You can have exquisite presentation with good choices of text, formatting and typography (including judicious use of colour, spacing and even animation and textures). A luxury printed book full of beautiful details will feel much better than a cheap paperback.

The best techniques can be applied in subtle ways to improve the overall presentation, without resorting to flashy showcases.

I agree with you. I'd love to see good examples of that, because I struggle to create that sort of websites.

For example, how would you redesign the Python docs to feel like a beautifully typeset book does?

Information can be beautiful on its own, if you follow some common patterns about contrast, clustering and hierarchy. These are based on the principles of Gestalt [1] which engineers can learn without having artsy skills by watching books and courses specific for us, e.g. [2].

Do you know about Edward Tufte? His work doesn't revolves specifically about software, but his principles show how to present technical information in the clearest way, and his books [3] are beautiful examples on how to put a technical topic in book form with clean and beautiful layouts.

[1] https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/topics/gestalt...

[2] https://medium.com/bigcommerce-developer-blog/design-for-dev...

[3] https://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_vdqi

A lot of Python docs are in fact pretty well designed to resemble a book without completely breaking the fluidity of the web page. They use serif fonts, apply font weights and colors subtly. In fact I think they strike the right balance between just being a regular webpage and completely succumbing to the constraints of the book as media.

https://flask.palletsprojects.com/en/2.2.x/