I gave myself a little birthday present last month by downloading the electronic version of “Everything They Had: Sports Writing from David Halberstam.”

Published in 2009, two years after the author’s tragic death in an automobile accident, “Everything They Had” is a collection of Halberstam’s non-book sportswriting for newspapers, magazines and online publications, including ESPN.com’s discontinued Page 2 feature.

In the introduction, editor Glenn Stout — who’s behind the SB Nation Longform feature I’ve blogged about here before — explained how Halberstam:

“. . . recognized that sports are important because sports matter to people, and that sports, and how we relate to sports, say something of value about ourselves, our society, and our history and culture, one of the rare places where citizens of differing creeds, classes and races come together.”

Influenced by the work of sportswriting giants W.C. Heinz, Red Smith and Jimmy Cannon, as well as New Journalism pioneers Gay Talese, Jimmy Breslin, Murray Kempton and Tom Wolfe, Halberstam made the break from daily journalism to focus on book writing in the mid-1960s.

The pieces in this collection span nearly six decades, and reveal the astonishing range and deeply humane touch Halberstam demonstrated in so much of his work, sports and otherwise. They include “Horse Racing in Warsaw” for The New York Times in 1965, as he was preparing to leave the newspaper business, “Why Men Love Baseball,” from Parade in 1989, “How I Fell in Love with the NFL,” from ESPN.com in 2001 and “Ice Breakers,” about female hockey players in Condé Nast Sports for Women in 1998.

Stout was working at the Boston Public Library when he met Halberstam, who was researching “The Summer of ‘49,” and it became an acquaintanceship that led to other collaborations. This collection’s title stems from a project they talked about, a compendium of sportswriting about women athletes they tentatively called “Everything She Had.”

That idea never came to fruition, but Stout immediately adapted the title for this volume, which received the endorsement of Halberstam’s widow.

While I’ve found collections ideal for e-reading, a book of this magnitude can’t be absorbed properly only in the digital realm. With my level of interest in the subject, as well as the author, my Christmas present to myself will have to be the print edition.

In a new introduction to the 1992 update of “The Best and the Brightest,” his Pulitzer Prize-winning account of American foreign and military policy in Vietnam, Halberstam wrote that while he wasn’t sentimental about the newspaper world, it was a challenge to do without a regular byline:

“The byline is a replacement for many other things, not the least of them money. If someone ever does a great psychological profile of journalism as a profession, what will be apparent will be the need for gratification — if not instant, then certainly relatively immediately. Reporters take sustenance from their bylines; they are a reflection of who you are, what you do, and why, to an uncommon degree, you exist.”

He explained in the same paragraph that “I had replaced the need for immediacy with something far more powerful, an obsession” and that his book projects were “many universities I entered.”

But he clearly longed to inhabit that vast creative space between the daily journalist he no longer was and the author he had become. The work in “Everything They Had” demonstrates the renewed sustenance Halberstam found between books. Readers will be rewarded with the additional gifts of his immense talent that have been expertly brought together in one volume.

When the SB Nation blog network rolled out its redesign Tuesday, it also introduced a new longform feature that’s becoming a standard part of many sports web ventures.

This comes on the heels of the launch of Sports on Earth, an online component of USA Today’s revamped sports operation that features the writing of former newspaper columnists Joe Posnanski, Dave Kindred, Chuck Culpepper, Tommy Tomlinson, Gwen Knapp and Shaun Powell, as well as Deadspin founding editor Will Leitch, among other established names.

With Tuesday sunset being the start of Yom Kippur, the SB Nation debut feature was “Mortal Gods,” a long, compelling treatise on baseball great Al Rosen written by R.D. Rosen (no relation) and worthy in quality with the efforts of other sports outlets vying to carve out new audiences with distinctive reporting and commentary.

While the overall SB Nation design is cleaner and much easier to navigate than before (with more than 300 fan blogs it needed to be), the visual experience with the longform feature still needs some work. For the moment, it looks like several different magazine format blocks jumbled together.

That’s a minor quibble, however. The most encouraging development about this project is the addition of noted sports author and historian Glenn Stout as the guiding force behind the SB Nation longform feature, which will appear each weekday.

He’s the author, most recently, of “Fenway 1912″ and since 1991 has been the editor of “The Best American Sportswriting” series. In an interview with Massachusetts journalist and soccer blogger Kevin Koczwara, Stout explains what he’s aiming for:

“There is always a market for quality writing. We’re not trying to duplicate any other site or any other publication; Grantland, Sports on Earth, The PostGame, The Classical, Deadspin, ESPN and even magazines like Sports Illustrated are all doing something different. So are we. We’re not bound to the news of the day. I’m personally not interested in writing from the couch, or work that apes sports talk radio or exists just to create empty arguments, and we’re not posting twenty stories a day. I’m focused on one thing – making sure you’ll find a sports story worth reading and spending time with, stories you can’t get anywhere else, that you’ll share with your friends, talk about, download to your tablet to read again and want to come back tomorrow to see what’s next. I think we’ll produce lasting work that will stand up to what any other outlet is doing and I’ll put our best up against anyone else’s.”

(Koczwara previously wrote about Stout last month for The Classical.)

How big of a market is there for longform sportswriting on the Web? Can it be as profitable as its recent proliferation might indicate? That’s still to be determined, but it is clear it’s being seen as a way to increase the value of a web property and attract more advertising interest.

Another commercially successful sports blog network, Bleacher Report, began hiring professional writers earlier this year to augment its hefty stable of unpaid fan bloggers. What it offered in audience it lacked in stronger advertising appeal, and changes to its design commenced soon after. In August, Turner Sports bought Bleacher Report for a reported $180 million.

After so many discouraging years of the so-called “race to the bottom” mentality prevailing in the wild expansion of sports sites — loaded with the bimbos, celebrities and snark referred to in the subtitle of this blog —  there’s an emerging realization that chasing page views and appealing to the lowest common denominator just aren’t enough.

So I’m about to push the “send order” button to Amazon/Santa for the sports book wish list I blogged about here last week, and “Wonder Girl,” Don Van Natta’s recent biography of Babe Didrickson Zaharias, is one of the three I’m treating myself to read over the holidays and into the new year.

The other two are Harvey Araton’s “When the Garden Was Eden” and “Fenway 1912″ by Glenn Stout.

These are the ones I’ve decided I just have to read right away. That they’re books about sports history isn’t a coincidence. I earned my bachelor’s degree in history and over the years have blended sports and history into my regular reading like a fiend. They’re unquenchable passions, and I’m thrilled to get reintroduced to the life of the Babe, whose feisty, pre-Title IX, pre-feminist personality is sorely missing in today’s women’s sports world.

But that’s a blog post for another time.

Van Natta, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist at The New York Times, is joining ESPN.com in January. Not long before the announcement, his soon-to-be-former-employer declined to review the Babe book. Coincidence?