Agreed--not just typography but in many cases the entire ebook experience is just terrible. Some works are very clearly just OCR'd from the print version, with no proofreading done (you can tell if you're reading one if you spot an obviously out-of-place word that would still pass a spellcheck). Others may be mostly presentable, but retain their print ephemera--for example, hyphenation in the middle of a paragraph, because there was a line break in the print version at that point.
It's not always the publisher's fault--I've developed a few ebooks for different platforms, and ebook readers today are where Mozilla and IE were around the IE5 browser wars. Developing a book that looks good across all platforms is difficult, if not impossible in some cases.
It wouldn't suck so much if we weren't paying almost the same price as a print book. Why would I pay ~$13 for a brand-new, often terrible-quality ebook (and a DRM'd one at that), when I could buy two print books for the same price, and get Amazon to ship them free to my door?
For the convenience of being able to carry it on your phone, make highlights and notes that you can search in the future, for the ability (if you're interested in it) of finding information about passages others who've read the same book found most interesting, for the ability to "loan" the book to a relative or friend in a distant state without having to send the book through the mail.
I'm not trying to say you're wrong or that I even disagree, I'm just trying to point out that people should have different expectations with ebooks and physical books (like I mentioned in my other post which was downvoted). ebooks are awesome in some ways physical books are not (and they're lousy in some ways that they really oughtn't be).
The point I most strongly agree on is where you say this is in its infancy (like the browsers wars). The first ebook I read was on a Windows PocketPC in about 2000 and it sucked. The whole technology has gotten dramatically better and I expect it will continue to, but it's not more than about 10 years old, really, and only really started gathering steam within about the past 5 years. And I'm not saying "therefore we should all have low expectations" but I, personally, am willing to look at all the things that have been done well and focus more on those than focusing on typography or whether editing is immediately correct.
> Why would I pay ~$13 for a brand-new, often terrible-quality ebook (and a DRM'd one at that), when I could buy two print books for the same price, and get Amazon to ship them free to my door?
I buy ebooks because they're easier to see... The lousy formatting makes them less enjoyable to read in some cases, but seeing is a prerequisite to reading. I need the inverted screen and the ability to enlarge the text and view the book on a back-lit display.
I've also noticed that my daughter, age 9, has an easier time reading ebooks with the text size bumped up than she does printed books. In her case, it's not about eyesight, but the fact that larger text and fewer words on the page makes it easier for her to focus - she retains what she's read better. There may be a slight tendency toward dyslexia or something there. It's not sever enough to get a diagnosis, but there is some sort of little "glitch" there that both we and her teachers have noticed it.
Instant delivery is another nice feature. If I decide at 10pm that I want to start a new novel, I can have it in my possession by 10:02.
So ebooks offer many advantages in the realm of accessibility, and there are certainly many more books available in ebook format than there are large print editions, but the poor typography and high price are certainly annoying.
I think its because the workflow is broken - what is the tool that you use to typeset to get beautiful ebooks in EPUB, MOBI and AZW ?
I dont know - and neither does reddit/selfpublish . How does an author go from writing to generating books without encountering specialized (and expensive) typesetters?
The first piece of advice that self-published Kindle authors will give you is to have a beautiful cover - how do you design one and integrate it into your ebook generation workflow to get one nice little package ?
Can I say that the publishers are fleecing us, when probably they are having to pay extra to make sure their ebooks look good on Kindle, Nook, Sony, etc. ?
The toolchain doesnt exist - and it is time for disruption.
> Why would I pay ~$13 for a brand-new, often terrible-quality ebook (and a DRM'd one at that), when I could buy two print books for the same price, and get Amazon to ship them free to my door?
Two printed paperback books, with their horrible sand-paper pages, pixelated fonts, and crease-forming covers... surely you can live with an out-of-place hyphen if you can live with a paperback.
It's still worth it when you're outside the US and want to get certain books that aren't published in your country or aren't imported in their original language. Then you save some money on shipping and a lot of time (the cheapest shipping takes almost a month to certain parts of the world). But yeah, ~$13 for an ebook is outrageous.
I can't stand ebook typography either. Almost half the kindle ebooks I buy are formatted so poorly I can't read them. It's a combination of awful technical decisions and very lazy typesetting.
Awful technical decisions such as: text justification and margins are fixed and inconsistent, spacing between words is awful, footnotes break the "navigate to last page" feature, pictures show up in the wrong place, tables look awful, charts and diagrams are full of jpeg compression artifacts) and so on.
It's really infuriating. Nowadays I check all 1-star and 2-star reviews for mention of "ebook" or "kindle". That usually keeps me from making a bad purchase. With the combination of lousy typesetting and comparatively high prices amazon really shows contempt for their customers.
I really don't think you can blame Amazon for the high prices of ebooks. From the publisher's perspective, ebook prices are disastrously low.
There does seem to be quite a bit of inconsistency on the part of the publishers, though. They complain that ebooks are destroying their business models, and then restrict Amazon and other retailers to charge comparable prices for ebooks, but they don't treat ebooks comparably themselves. Ignoring the fact that releasing an ebook doesn't require physical printing and the multitude of material and labor costs associated with that, they don't seem to apply the same editorial (and typographic) effort that they do with printed books.
"Almost half the kindle ebooks I buy are formatted so
poorly I can't (sic) read them."
Honestly? I think the typesetting is quite awful too but it has not interfered with my ability to parse the words on the screen.
I really wish that the typesetting was better but I am not sure if this is something that we will see any time soon. Can you imagine running latex on the kindle cpu everytime you flipped a page? On the other hand the ebook files would be huge if you prerendering all of the pages. You would have to prerender a separate page starting at every "location" and in each font size. That is an enormous number of combinations.
There are two issues here. The author doesn't really seem to care about distinguishing them, so I will:
1) Shitty rendering engines used in (some) ebook readers. If the ebook original has an em dash and it's being converted and displayed as hyphens, that's just bad rendering. Same thing if it has two hyphens together in a prose text context surrounded by spaces, and it's not being shown as an em dash, bad.
2) ebooks that start out bad. In this case, it's garbage in, garbage out. For this, the blame goes to the publishers, as he correctly noted.
Has anyone done side by side comparisons of the same books, from the same publishers (I'm not talking about Gutenberg books that may have been converted using differing technologies, but major publishers), on different ebook readers from different companies?
I think there's a parallel to hacking though. On our weekend projects, our babies, our github projects we're most proud of, we like to make sure that we get it right: clean code, beautiful abstractions, efficient implementation, etc -- because we, as hackers, get a kick out of that. We have a gut feeling what is the right way to write a certain program. Like a painter knows where to draw the next line.
...but does that mean that we do the same in our day to day jobs? The code that you have to fire out to meet next Friday's deadline? The program that will make it into the next product that needs to hit the market now? I'd bet almost all of us know the feeling of, "ah, if only I had a little more time, I know exactly how to code this the way it should be". But this is business so (a) the time you need just isn't there and (b) what the heck, you don't care as much about the accounting app your company sells anyway.
So, yes, I'm sure that ebook publishers aren't idiots. And they know that ebooks can be done differently from printed books. But they are businessmen, too, and so the question is always: will doing these changes give them more profit? That is, will the additional costs of e.g. moving the glossy-paper pictures from a central position directly to the parts of the books that refer to them result in more sales? Or sales at a higher price?
I figure if the answer were yes, the publishers would do it. But as long as they get away with sloppy editing and one-to-one copies of paper prints, why would they?
The additional costs are not material costs, but that people have to sit down and make these edits. And that's not just one guy spending half a day to do that.
Think of it in context. A few short years ago nobody had e-readers because books that people wanted were not available, and nobody cared to publish books in electronic format because nobody owned e-readers. That's why Amazon and others had to come up with fast and cheap ways to scan thousands of paper books. There was not enough sales to pay for adapting each title for the new format, but prices for ebooks had to be high enough so that ebooks weren't jeopardizing paper book sales (otherwise publishers won't agree to have them scanned).
Of course it's unfortunate that consumers are now left with sub-par product, but I think it was necessary to get the ecosystem going. Beautiful typography and ebook-appropriate formatting will get there, just give it a little time.
Typesetting a longish (~800k plain text) novel using XeLaTeX and the microtype package takes my 2Ghz CPU about 30 seconds, and produces a 1.8MB PDF.
Current tablets should be able to re-render an individual chapter in a second or two, and it would not be any trouble for ebook distributors like B&N and Amazon to pre-render portrait and landscape versions at several different type sizes.
Fixing the abysmal typography of ebooks really wouldn't take much work, and would probably be the best thing ebook publishers could do to woo serious book-lovers who aren't also geeks. Why aren't they even trying?
I'm with you; I think ebooks should be distributed in some variant of XeLaTeX and rendered using its toolchain. You retain the structure and can change the size of the text, font, etc. as the user desires. It would be leaps and bounds better than the current level of typography you see on the iPad and Kindle.
The only thing I can think of is that normal people, even book-lovers, don't care. We have been trained by reading webpages so much of the time that we have low standards. But the sad thing is, ebooks generally have worse typography than your average blog post read in a typical web browser. I'm looking at you, iBooks. Jesus.
I think its probably a little more involved than prerendering each page at the different font sizes. For each individual location (I don't know the b+n equivalent term) you need to prerender a page that starts with that location at each font size.
I take it that your 800k novel does not have an index and/or a lot of intra-text references. 30 seconds would be a great time with indexes and references. Why don't you use fontspec too?
You have to understand the publishing industry to understand why eBooks fail so terribly in design and typography. Most publishers could care less about the eBook format. They still have this idealistic vision that eBooks will die off. Publishers are truly idiots. I work for a startup in the digital book space and we get so many ePubs that do not meet standards and are formatted incorrectly. We end up having to hack our code to cater to each publisher. Some publishers are better than others but most of them honestly do not care about eBooks.
I've read a lot of ebooks (even long before I got a kindle) and I have to say that I read them for the story, not the presentation.
What is wrong with ebooks is that there are still books that I _cannot_ buy. I want to give the publishers/writers my money and they simply will not accept it. For me its e or nothing, I don't have the space to store paper books, and to be honest I just like ebooks better.
I find it strange that such a complaint about typography is done on a web-page I have hard time reading with my Chrome. The font is too small, and trying to enlarge it make the column narrower but the font size stay the same. When selecting text has some weird contours. There are some CSS tricks behind this, I guess. They seem to imply that the author is not fully aware of the number 1 rule of typography: it must be done according to the medium.
Books and newspapers don't have the same typographic rules. The web have other rules. Ebooks probably have other yet-to-be-invented rules.
But I agree with the claim: most of the books I have read on my Kindle have bad typography. It should be fixed on two sides: The reader's software can be improved[1], and ebooks have to be proofread and adapted to this medium.
[1] Oh I wish Amazon could iterate on the Kindle (I mean the real one, with e-ink), improve its reader software, its browser, etc., instead of running after iPad's success.
I've come across a number of Kindle eBooks with numerous typos or other errors. It's like they simply OCR'd a printed book and didn't bother to check for issues ('Too Big to Fail' by Andrew Ross Sorkin is the most egregious I've bought).
Many of these books are eventually corrected and Amazon will email letting you know this so you can get an updated copy, but this has generally been months, or years[1], after I've put up with the problems and finished reading the book.
And it would be nice if pictures were handled better. I think ideally they should all be put at the end of the eBook but have links in the text that take you to the relevant picture, so you can quickly look at it and hit "back" to go back to the text where you left of.
[1]: Just this morning, I got an email from Amazon telling me a book I purchased in May 2009 has been updated with corrections.
Your suggestion to put images at the end creates the same problem that footnotes do. Namely it breaks sync to last page read. The author of the linked post laments this very problem.
To deal with this issue I've taken a few Gutenberg texts, converted them to LaTex and then rendered then into PDFs designed for my reader (nook Simple Touch). It's laborious, but it looks great.
My eBook reader renders plain flat TXT files pretty good, and in the font and fontsize I can specify myself (instead of having to look at some poor choices made by someone else for a PDF).
I am quite passionate about this and my husband and I are trying to fix it. If you want to be kept in the loop http://www.pixelpublish.com
I write popular fiction right into Tex and use pdflatex to typeset my books. But that is also not a solution. As error proof as it is, it is rather cumbersome and not very user friendly.
The problem of (most) of today'e ebooks is not that they are typeset in Word, but that they are converted from Word.
Contrary to common sense, authors' write (produce text) in Word (WYSIWYG editor -- not text) and then they upload their .doc files into epub creators to produce epubs (text). Yes, we go from text to text via something that isn't text. Bound to be a few glitches.
Word has hidden commands that an average user cannot anticipate unless they are surgically careful with their formatting. Most of today's epublishers have written an entire book length instructions on how to do this error free. It's exhausting.
In my opinion, writing, as a process, must be revolutionized for this to be fixed.
I've read a lot of non-technical books on the Kindle app for iPhone, and I haven't noticed any serious flaws. Generally I find the experience to be extremely pleasant, particularly compared to random PDFs I've tried to read through iBooks. Perhaps this is more of a problem with books with different typesetting for code vs. prose, etc?
FWIW, I agree most prose works great and think you're right that the technical book experience is where it's most clearly lacking (not being able to quickly flip to an appendix or back / forth 5 pages is a big annoyance of mine).
There are ways I think it works poorly for prose, though, too. The most obvious example to me is the George RR Martin Fire & Ice books. When I'm reading those, I very frequently want to flip from a section of the book to the maps of the world described in the book. I read a physical copy of the first two books but went to Kindle (both the 3rd generation Kindle and Android app) for the third and it's tedious to set a book mark, navigate to marks and notes, find the map, and then navigate back to the bookmark. Additionally, the map images in the ebook are of such low quality that they are nearly unreadable. Lastly, there's an appendix of the families represented in these books at the back (who's who). When reading the first two books, I often would consult that, too, but once I'd done that with the Kindle book, it made it really painful to switch back and forth between reading on my phone vs. my kindle, because the "sync" function is "sync to furthest page read" - which is at the end of the book, not my current place in the book.
All of the above gripes with that book would be plain to see for anyone who bothered trying to read the book on a kindle - and it should be obvious to the kindle team that "sync to furthest page read" breaks when a book has an appendix / index or something that readers are likely to consult.
If my Kobo would just (word)wrap code samples in ePubs, I'd be happy. It lets them run off the right edge, with no control to horizontally scroll to see the rest (awkward as that would be).
I guess once I grok ePub a bit better, I can editing the texts to change the code samples' formatting.
Also annoying: It will landscape PDF's, but not ePubs.
Yawn, this old saw? Despite the fact that every person who cares about this has a blog where they complain about it, the market is indicating pretty clearly that this is not so important that it needs to be solved today. I'm sure this will get better over time and I suppose posts from people like this will help motivate it, but don't we all get it by now?
Recalibrate your expectations a little - buying an ebook is a lot like buying a physical book, but it's not the same thing. Maybe I should start blogging about how unhappy I am with the portability of physical books or how I was in an airport and wanted to rip the first chapter out of a book in the store to read on the plane but the store owner TOTALLY wouldn't let me!
Until a publisher comes along who takes the effort to present eBooks properly, grabs a big share of the market and others follow suit. (see: iPhone for an example of how manufacturers take note of selling trends).
I don't have a Kindle or other ebook reader, so I can't speak from experience but are some publishers better than others?
I mean, there are many very bad physical book publishers out there that don't (or minimally) edit the copy sent to them before sending it to the presses. That translates into the digital realm too, but there is a much lower barrier for entry for bad publishers and it's hard to differentiate between bad and good publishers in these early days.
If no publisher out there is doing a good job, it might be something to invest time into and maybe make some money.
I'd be glad with a nice default (chosen by publisher) that can be changed. Technical books are usually using different font than novels, than cookbooks, than children stories, ...
We made the book in html, and converted that into PDFs. The process was quite hard over all. Haven't started on the process of turning it into an EPUB yet.
It comes down to resources and throwing them at the highest return. For all the people complaining about typography in ebooks, if they were indeed hand set for the new format, you'd have people complaining that certain books aren't available in an electronic format fast enough. It's impossible to please everyone.
[+] [-] acabal|14 years ago|reply
It's not always the publisher's fault--I've developed a few ebooks for different platforms, and ebook readers today are where Mozilla and IE were around the IE5 browser wars. Developing a book that looks good across all platforms is difficult, if not impossible in some cases.
It wouldn't suck so much if we weren't paying almost the same price as a print book. Why would I pay ~$13 for a brand-new, often terrible-quality ebook (and a DRM'd one at that), when I could buy two print books for the same price, and get Amazon to ship them free to my door?
[+] [-] slipperyp|14 years ago|reply
I'm not trying to say you're wrong or that I even disagree, I'm just trying to point out that people should have different expectations with ebooks and physical books (like I mentioned in my other post which was downvoted). ebooks are awesome in some ways physical books are not (and they're lousy in some ways that they really oughtn't be).
The point I most strongly agree on is where you say this is in its infancy (like the browsers wars). The first ebook I read was on a Windows PocketPC in about 2000 and it sucked. The whole technology has gotten dramatically better and I expect it will continue to, but it's not more than about 10 years old, really, and only really started gathering steam within about the past 5 years. And I'm not saying "therefore we should all have low expectations" but I, personally, am willing to look at all the things that have been done well and focus more on those than focusing on typography or whether editing is immediately correct.
[+] [-] kellishaver|14 years ago|reply
I buy ebooks because they're easier to see... The lousy formatting makes them less enjoyable to read in some cases, but seeing is a prerequisite to reading. I need the inverted screen and the ability to enlarge the text and view the book on a back-lit display.
I've also noticed that my daughter, age 9, has an easier time reading ebooks with the text size bumped up than she does printed books. In her case, it's not about eyesight, but the fact that larger text and fewer words on the page makes it easier for her to focus - she retains what she's read better. There may be a slight tendency toward dyslexia or something there. It's not sever enough to get a diagnosis, but there is some sort of little "glitch" there that both we and her teachers have noticed it.
Instant delivery is another nice feature. If I decide at 10pm that I want to start a new novel, I can have it in my possession by 10:02.
So ebooks offer many advantages in the realm of accessibility, and there are certainly many more books available in ebook format than there are large print editions, but the poor typography and high price are certainly annoying.
[+] [-] w1ntermute|14 years ago|reply
Why are books even OCRed to create ebooks? Do they not have the original digital copy of them to work from?
[+] [-] sandGorgon|14 years ago|reply
I dont know - and neither does reddit/selfpublish . How does an author go from writing to generating books without encountering specialized (and expensive) typesetters?
The first piece of advice that self-published Kindle authors will give you is to have a beautiful cover - how do you design one and integrate it into your ebook generation workflow to get one nice little package ? Can I say that the publishers are fleecing us, when probably they are having to pay extra to make sure their ebooks look good on Kindle, Nook, Sony, etc. ?
The toolchain doesnt exist - and it is time for disruption.
[+] [-] MatthewPhillips|14 years ago|reply
Two printed paperback books, with their horrible sand-paper pages, pixelated fonts, and crease-forming covers... surely you can live with an out-of-place hyphen if you can live with a paperback.
[+] [-] bmuon|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gizmo|14 years ago|reply
Awful technical decisions such as: text justification and margins are fixed and inconsistent, spacing between words is awful, footnotes break the "navigate to last page" feature, pictures show up in the wrong place, tables look awful, charts and diagrams are full of jpeg compression artifacts) and so on.
It's really infuriating. Nowadays I check all 1-star and 2-star reviews for mention of "ebook" or "kindle". That usually keeps me from making a bad purchase. With the combination of lousy typesetting and comparatively high prices amazon really shows contempt for their customers.
[+] [-] rubergly|14 years ago|reply
There does seem to be quite a bit of inconsistency on the part of the publishers, though. They complain that ebooks are destroying their business models, and then restrict Amazon and other retailers to charge comparable prices for ebooks, but they don't treat ebooks comparably themselves. Ignoring the fact that releasing an ebook doesn't require physical printing and the multitude of material and labor costs associated with that, they don't seem to apply the same editorial (and typographic) effort that they do with printed books.
[+] [-] dfc|14 years ago|reply
I really wish that the typesetting was better but I am not sure if this is something that we will see any time soon. Can you imagine running latex on the kindle cpu everytime you flipped a page? On the other hand the ebook files would be huge if you prerendering all of the pages. You would have to prerender a separate page starting at every "location" and in each font size. That is an enormous number of combinations.
[+] [-] natch|14 years ago|reply
1) Shitty rendering engines used in (some) ebook readers. If the ebook original has an em dash and it's being converted and displayed as hyphens, that's just bad rendering. Same thing if it has two hyphens together in a prose text context surrounded by spaces, and it's not being shown as an em dash, bad.
2) ebooks that start out bad. In this case, it's garbage in, garbage out. For this, the blame goes to the publishers, as he correctly noted.
Has anyone done side by side comparisons of the same books, from the same publishers (I'm not talking about Gutenberg books that may have been converted using differing technologies, but major publishers), on different ebook readers from different companies?
[+] [-] kleiba|14 years ago|reply
...but does that mean that we do the same in our day to day jobs? The code that you have to fire out to meet next Friday's deadline? The program that will make it into the next product that needs to hit the market now? I'd bet almost all of us know the feeling of, "ah, if only I had a little more time, I know exactly how to code this the way it should be". But this is business so (a) the time you need just isn't there and (b) what the heck, you don't care as much about the accounting app your company sells anyway.
So, yes, I'm sure that ebook publishers aren't idiots. And they know that ebooks can be done differently from printed books. But they are businessmen, too, and so the question is always: will doing these changes give them more profit? That is, will the additional costs of e.g. moving the glossy-paper pictures from a central position directly to the parts of the books that refer to them result in more sales? Or sales at a higher price?
I figure if the answer were yes, the publishers would do it. But as long as they get away with sloppy editing and one-to-one copies of paper prints, why would they?
The additional costs are not material costs, but that people have to sit down and make these edits. And that's not just one guy spending half a day to do that.
[+] [-] azov|14 years ago|reply
Of course it's unfortunate that consumers are now left with sub-par product, but I think it was necessary to get the ecosystem going. Beautiful typography and ebook-appropriate formatting will get there, just give it a little time.
[+] [-] wtallis|14 years ago|reply
Current tablets should be able to re-render an individual chapter in a second or two, and it would not be any trouble for ebook distributors like B&N and Amazon to pre-render portrait and landscape versions at several different type sizes.
Fixing the abysmal typography of ebooks really wouldn't take much work, and would probably be the best thing ebook publishers could do to woo serious book-lovers who aren't also geeks. Why aren't they even trying?
[+] [-] pak|14 years ago|reply
The only thing I can think of is that normal people, even book-lovers, don't care. We have been trained by reading webpages so much of the time that we have low standards. But the sad thing is, ebooks generally have worse typography than your average blog post read in a typical web browser. I'm looking at you, iBooks. Jesus.
[+] [-] dfc|14 years ago|reply
I take it that your 800k novel does not have an index and/or a lot of intra-text references. 30 seconds would be a great time with indexes and references. Why don't you use fontspec too?
[+] [-] johnnyn|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kbatten|14 years ago|reply
What is wrong with ebooks is that there are still books that I _cannot_ buy. I want to give the publishers/writers my money and they simply will not accept it. For me its e or nothing, I don't have the space to store paper books, and to be honest I just like ebooks better.
[+] [-] gbog|14 years ago|reply
Books and newspapers don't have the same typographic rules. The web have other rules. Ebooks probably have other yet-to-be-invented rules.
But I agree with the claim: most of the books I have read on my Kindle have bad typography. It should be fixed on two sides: The reader's software can be improved[1], and ebooks have to be proofread and adapted to this medium.
[1] Oh I wish Amazon could iterate on the Kindle (I mean the real one, with e-ink), improve its reader software, its browser, etc., instead of running after iPad's success.
[+] [-] reaganing|14 years ago|reply
Many of these books are eventually corrected and Amazon will email letting you know this so you can get an updated copy, but this has generally been months, or years[1], after I've put up with the problems and finished reading the book.
And it would be nice if pictures were handled better. I think ideally they should all be put at the end of the eBook but have links in the text that take you to the relevant picture, so you can quickly look at it and hit "back" to go back to the text where you left of.
[1]: Just this morning, I got an email from Amazon telling me a book I purchased in May 2009 has been updated with corrections.
[+] [-] dfc|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheCowboy|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bhickey|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Luyt|14 years ago|reply
With that in mind, I convert the Gutenberg etexts to a textual format my eBook will show nicely (joining sentences to paragraphs etc), see http://www.michielovertoom.com/python/gutenberg-ebook-scrapi... , source on https://github.com/motoom/gutenberg-ebook-scraping
[+] [-] maxerickson|14 years ago|reply
(It purports to take the work out of Gutenberg->Latex->PDF; I've not used it, simply had it buried in the back of my head somewhere)
[+] [-] tnicola|14 years ago|reply
I write popular fiction right into Tex and use pdflatex to typeset my books. But that is also not a solution. As error proof as it is, it is rather cumbersome and not very user friendly.
The problem of (most) of today'e ebooks is not that they are typeset in Word, but that they are converted from Word.
Contrary to common sense, authors' write (produce text) in Word (WYSIWYG editor -- not text) and then they upload their .doc files into epub creators to produce epubs (text). Yes, we go from text to text via something that isn't text. Bound to be a few glitches.
Word has hidden commands that an average user cannot anticipate unless they are surgically careful with their formatting. Most of today's epublishers have written an entire book length instructions on how to do this error free. It's exhausting.
In my opinion, writing, as a process, must be revolutionized for this to be fixed.
[+] [-] brnstz|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slipperyp|14 years ago|reply
There are ways I think it works poorly for prose, though, too. The most obvious example to me is the George RR Martin Fire & Ice books. When I'm reading those, I very frequently want to flip from a section of the book to the maps of the world described in the book. I read a physical copy of the first two books but went to Kindle (both the 3rd generation Kindle and Android app) for the third and it's tedious to set a book mark, navigate to marks and notes, find the map, and then navigate back to the bookmark. Additionally, the map images in the ebook are of such low quality that they are nearly unreadable. Lastly, there's an appendix of the families represented in these books at the back (who's who). When reading the first two books, I often would consult that, too, but once I'd done that with the Kindle book, it made it really painful to switch back and forth between reading on my phone vs. my kindle, because the "sync" function is "sync to furthest page read" - which is at the end of the book, not my current place in the book.
All of the above gripes with that book would be plain to see for anyone who bothered trying to read the book on a kindle - and it should be obvious to the kindle team that "sync to furthest page read" breaks when a book has an appendix / index or something that readers are likely to consult.
[+] [-] pasbesoin|14 years ago|reply
I guess once I grok ePub a bit better, I can editing the texts to change the code samples' formatting.
Also annoying: It will landscape PDF's, but not ePubs.
/grump
[+] [-] slipperyp|14 years ago|reply
Recalibrate your expectations a little - buying an ebook is a lot like buying a physical book, but it's not the same thing. Maybe I should start blogging about how unhappy I am with the portability of physical books or how I was in an airport and wanted to rip the first chapter out of a book in the store to read on the plane but the store owner TOTALLY wouldn't let me!
[+] [-] marquis|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mjschultz|14 years ago|reply
I mean, there are many very bad physical book publishers out there that don't (or minimally) edit the copy sent to them before sending it to the presses. That translates into the digital realm too, but there is a much lower barrier for entry for bad publishers and it's hard to differentiate between bad and good publishers in these early days.
If no publisher out there is doing a good job, it might be something to invest time into and maybe make some money.
[+] [-] rbanffy|14 years ago|reply
Also, when you are talking about ebooks, shouldn't things like font selection be left for the reader (the being, not the machine) to decide?
[+] [-] viraptor|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] illumen|14 years ago|reply
Our ebook is for the open source/FOSS project PyGame. http://www.pygamezine.com/
PyGameZine is in Beta, and we're launching today.
We made the book in html, and converted that into PDFs. The process was quite hard over all. Haven't started on the process of turning it into an EPUB yet.
[+] [-] adrianN|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 8ig8|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] larrik|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
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