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.
The same reason why Amazon takes their own photos of products.
You would think the same people who design, manufacture, and market a product can have their shit together long enough to take some great beauty shots for e-tailers. But nope. The vast majority of vendors are so poorly organized, so bureaucratically frozen, that getting them to do anything that isn't already part of the process is like pulling teeth.
So, "please send us digital copies of this manuscript" is pretty much out of the question. The easiest way is to take a copy of the book, OCR it yourself, and then get the license to distribute it.
I hope Amazon can use its relative dominance in the ebook industry to change how things work. The ideal future would be one in which the publishers simply provide the text to Amazon in some sort of standardized markup (sort of like LaTeX), in which format the books would be supplied to the customers.
The customers would then be able to customize the font sizes/stylings, etc., and use those settings for all the ebooks they read.
If they are subcontracting the ebook dev process to a third party, perhaps not. And also, the whole editing to typesetting process is probably a hellish mix of Word and InDesign files, which leaves no "pristine copy" to pick the structured text out of. (Imagine: edits late in the process are made to the typeset InDesign files, after the structure has been lost.) You need structured text for creating an ebook because the ebook software does its own typesetting. So to pick up all the late edits, the only choice might be to OCR the final book and re-apply the structure. Yep, it's sad.
> If they are subcontracting the ebook dev process to a third party, perhaps not.
So they're not willing to provide the original source files, or what?
> edits late in the process are made to the typeset InDesign files, after the structure has been lost.
Wow, they do this so haphazardly that they don't even bother to go back to the original Word file and add the same edits?
Is InDesign used for all books? I don't see why you would need it for something without any figures/graphs/tables. You could just use Word, and things would work out fine.
Word's typographical capabilities are just as bad as current ebooks. Word is absolutely not capable of producing professional quality text. So, while it may be useful for drafting a book, it is worthless for getting it ready for press.
As for why OCR is used, just look at the range of books that are now available electronically. There are a lot of books from the 1980s and earlier that are now available as EPUBs. Do you really think that it would have been easier to use the source files off floppies? (Keep in mind that the floppies are, for the most part, long gone.)
> As for why OCR is used, just look at the range of books that are now available electronically. There are a lot of books from the 1980s and earlier that are now available as EPUBs. Do you really think that it would have been easier to use the source files off floppies?
Most likely, by using PostScript (edit: sometimes, even high-resolution raster) files that have no semantic markup and cannot be automatically reformatted in any way other than simple zooming/scaling. Such files are not much easier to transform into ebooks than scans are, but are probably harder to get access to.
This state of things is quite apalling. Given how small the source files are, I would've thought that publishers would keep an up-to-date copy of all of their books in a centralized repository.
Some publishers might do this. But it would be very surprising if any major publisher has been completely standardized on using the exact same toolchain and file formats for more than 20 years. Most publishers also have no incentive to modernize the markup for a book that's not getting any content updates.
With all due respect I have extensively used Word, InDesign, & LaTeX and, contrary to your belief, typesetting can be (and is often) achieved in Word quite effectively.
Sure, ligatures have been supported for a while (since Office 2007, I believe). In any case, I was able to enable them in Office 2010. I would post a screenshot, but my Windows VM crashed when I tried to take one, and now refuses to start. I'm sure you can find info on it online.
I know that people like to harp on and on about how great LaTeX or InDesign are, and when it comes to complex layouts (particularly LaTeX if there are lots of referenced figures and InDesign for text wrapping, etc.), I agree. If you were writing a scientific article, I'd tell you to use LaTeX. If you were creating a magazine, I'd tell you to use InDesign.
But for your typical, text-only, fiction novel, the kind you're most likely to read on a Kindle? I don't think it really makes a difference.
FWIW, I don't think any publisher that uses an actual printing press uses Word to typeset books, simply because they almost certainly use the whole Adobe toolchain for prepress [1], and InDesign integrates much more nicely with this process. For example, Word has no facilities for color spaces, separation, or generating the actual plate images.
I guess they could generate PDFs from Word files with Acrobat and shoehorn them into the process, but any publisher that is actually satisfied with doing that is bonkers.
If I wasn't fond of Emacs, I would probably do my writing in AbiWord or WordPad. Putting a lot of work in a bloated format like .doc(x) kind of scares me. Though maybe Word with rtf would perform well.
Well, as you can probably tell from my initial post, my knowledge of mainstream publishing practices is nil. Though from what I can discern, a lot of the problems have to do with poor technology usage.
People make a big deal about how using Word will lock you into a certain format when they're storing their data on floppies or, even worse, rasterizing it and keeping just the PS. Seems like the latter is a lot worse than the former.
This is the point I was trying to make in my comments earlier. Typography is a feature. Right now we're seeing Minimum Viable Ebooks. Ship.
What is the incentive for better typography? Most books are like mini-monopolies (over the short term). If the typography of a book sucks and it sucks on all platforms, what is a consumer to do if they want to read the book? Fallback to print? Publishers probably don't mind that. It's true that all things being equal, typography could be a deciding factor for the consumer, but my gut says that in most cases the content is weighted much higher.
I think the platform could benefit from typography. A consumer may choose an iPad over a Kindle if the iPad had a better reputation for typography. But since there is _art_ involved it might not be economical for the platform to pursue it. Which is a better selling point: Our platform has 100 really nice books or our platform has 100,000 books?
No, but this is how the iPod beat every other mp3 player -- it was just undefinably better to use. Typography is one of those features; most people don't think they even notice it, but they do.
Your mom might select a kindle fire if she hears from all her savvy friends and family that the kindle fire delivers a better experience. She may even hear why it does, but she may not care about the why, just that trusted sources inform her it is better.
I believe this is true in general. A few savvy people catch on that a product is better and it becomes a meme that others rely upon for their decisions.
Don't talk about my mom like that! (In all honesty she is not really into savvy/hip people;)
I do not think that there are enogh savvy-typography-valuing-people to induce some market driving meme. If this was the case Word would have died many years ago...
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.
The paperback managed to put the hyphen in the right place. At least it's making an effort. When was the last time you saw paperback had an out of place hyphen just because that's where the hardcover placed it?
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.
Yeah, the publishers are mourning the loss of "hardcover edition" in the ebook format. That's where they make their mint.
I'm hoping that they will try (and catch on) a ebook+hardcover release model. After all, people buy hardcover either (a) because they need the product now and can't wait for paperback (or there isn't one), or (b) because they also want to show it off in their personal library. The ebook+paperback could offer that experience. Hardcover $30, Hardcover+ebook $33. That's $3 for free. Oh, hmm, looks like O'Reilly is already is doing this bit :-)
A month after each new release, you make paperback and ebook available simultaneously, offering the ebook at minus publishing and shipping costs. ($5 paperback, $3 ebook?)
"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.
For me the major flaw is the lack of use of vector graphics in some cases. I have a number of technical Kindle books which attempt to use fixed-sized images for equations and they become so pixelated that they are completely unreadable.
As others have already pointed out, you don't need to compile from Latex on the device. The formats already have support for passable typography. Publishers aren't making an effort to use it.
I haven't used a recent Kindle, but the original eInk screens were slow enough that the tablet most certainly could have run TeX on the next page in the time it took to clear the screen.
Do you have benchmarks for running a tex engine on a tablet CPU? Everytime this topic comes upo on comp.tex the consensus seems to be that tablets are not yet capable of running tex on the fly.
The core of TeX is fast enough for any modern hardware, even tablets. For example, my laptop can compile the 494 page TeXbook (http://www.ctan.org/pkg/texbook) in about half a second.
What slows TeX down is that many packages use extremely elaborate abstractions, which all need to be evaluated using string expansion. These days you shouldn't be surprised if some package is using floating point emulation with TeX macros (https://github.com/latex3/svn-mirror/blob/master/l3kernel/l3...) behind your back. Handy yes, but certainly not fast.
Probably not for a whole book, but for a single chapter? Almost certainly. And if you eschew the features of XeTeX or LuaTeX and just stick with pdfTeX, things could be very quick: For the example I posted elsewhere in this thread of typesetting a novel in 30s with XeLaTeX, pdfTeX does it in about 6s. A single chapter (32k of text): 0.8s, and I/O bound at that. Even if a tablet's 800Mhz Cortex A8 does that 5 times slower than my Core 2, it's fast enough to be done speculatively. It's certainly no slower than loading a web page over the internet.
For the single chapter test, the book was stored with each chapter in a separate tex file. All but one of the \input statements was commented out, but the preamble stayed the same as in the previous test: pdfLaTeX with microtype, memoir class, but no fontspec. The output was 25 pages. Enabling SyncTeX gives about a 30% slowdown in wall time, but only about 10% slowdown in CPU time.
(For comparison, when run on the slowest CPU I have handy, a 1.5Ghz Athlon XP, the single chapter takes 1.5s wall time and 1.1s CPU time.)
Except that the calculations need to be done before the eInk rendering even begins. If you were just saying that the difference between 1s and 1.5s is less than between 0.1s and 0.6s then sure, but I would argue that once you are above a certain threshhold making it even slower is even more annoying and they should do anything they can to shave off whatever ms they can.
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.
this should change when many people start telling how they would have liked the ebook version more if it would have been polished a bit, most of the time business think they are doing fine unless someone complains or bring these difficulty to their attention.
this will also change when more and more people are opting ebook version to the printed copy. as of now the printed copy sells more compared to ebook format AFAIK and the ebook format is catching up fast for the many convenience stated in the posts here. We can expect a change soon as many people are getting ebooks and raising their concerns.
this could also change when some really nice product(device or software) to read ebooks comes to the market, I dream of a ebook reader where I can annotate, mark and make notes using a stylus like device. while many of these features are available in the ebook readers today they don't give the same feel as using a printed copy, for example (making handwritten notes)
But rationally speaking, if someone who bought the ebook tells the publisher that they would have liked it better if it had feature X, the incentive for the publisher to implement that feature is still pretty low - after all, the guy complaining bought the ebook anyway.
It may have a long time effect though, because the same customer might not be willing to buy the next ebook from the same publisher unless the perceived annoyances go away.
And competition from other publishers might help too.
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.
Hmm, I had no need for the programming additions in LuaTeX; my main concern was using UTF-8 and having better integration between LaTeX and my system fonts. XeLaTeX offers a great out-of-the-box experience for using commercial, "pro" fonts, particularly on a Mac; check out the 'fontspec' package. However, I've heard the LuaTeX can do microtypography really nicely, and I haven't checked if they've made using system fonts easier, so maybe it's work a second look.
There is a beta 'microtype' package for XeTeX but it doesn't have all the features that LuaTeX has (font expansion?).
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?
No cross-references, just a table of contents, but fontspec was used.
I don't believe that you need to render a new PDF for every possible location in the book. It's ok for a hyperlink to point to something in the middle of a page.
Thats a pretty decent time for laying out that much text. I would like to point out that if you throw in indexes or a complete "book environment" like memoir that time is going to change remarkably.
Why are we talking about PDFs now? If you seek to a location in the kindle it takes you to a page with that location at the top. That location might be in the middle if you read from cover to cover.
I'm already using the memoir class, albeit with a fairly minimalist theme. And indexes can be partially pre-computed if necessary, though it may require some changes from how it's done in stock LaTeX.
The reason we're talking about PDFs is because that's the quickest and easiest way to get good typography on screen. And being able to scroll to put an arbitrary line at the top of the page is not a killer feature for a book replacement, and certainly doesn't make up for a book that is hard to read due to poor line spacing, justification, and kerning.
You are not using indexes if you are laying out 800k of text in 30 seconds with memoir+fontspec+microtype. I'm not sure what a partial index even is but whatever it is you are right its vaporware at the moment.
As far as PDFs go what ebook reader uses pdfs as the native ebook format?
Out of curiosity if you set the paper size to ebook in memoir how does the compilation time change?
Are those advanced packages needed for ebooks? Consider Knuth's TeXbook, written in plain TeX (the source is available on CTAN) and which looks good enough for me:
$ time tex texbook.tex
Output written on texbook.dvi (494 pages, 2029384 bytes).
Transcript written on texbook.log.
real 0m0.615s
user 0m0.584s
sys 0m0.024s
(And an e-book reader would only need the information in a DVI file, assuming the fonts are built-in.)
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.
Interesting you mention Fire & Ice, I read the first three primarily on Kindle for iPhone.
I did get into the habit of bookmarking my current page to reference the maps and appendix. Generally my biggest problem with "sync to furthest page read" was reading while underground (subway). Usually I just fire up the iPhone briefly so it will sync forward if I want to read on a different device.
There is also the "Book Extras" section which, for Ice & Fire, includes content from Shelfari with some appendix info and does not break the furthest page read. It would be nice if the official appendix and maps were included in a similar format.
I worked around the syncing but it was tedious. Primarily I would read on my phone on the bus during commutes and want to use my Kindle at home. However, having viewed the appendices of families, I could not simply sync. This was tedious, but less tedious than lugging around that tome :) I think annoyances like that are really about the software, though, and I expect it to continue to get better, though the changes in Kindle have not been on details like that, they've been the library lending thing, getting some free books into prime, and lending. I'd love to see some smaller fit & finish.
I haven't noticed the "Book Extras" you mention and will have to investigate - thanks for the tip!
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).
What I'm saying is that I'm not convinced that this would move a significant chunk of the market. I could be totally wrong but my impression is that this is a lot more like the a gold rush with all parties scrambling to lock in business with the factors that are most compelling to potential customers and I believe those factors are things like selection, platform cost, and maybe other functionality of the device. Whether the fonts are beautiful or whether the books are rendered with more than one style of the "-" glyph is probably somewhere like priority #153.
Which is NOT to say that I disagree that it matters.
I just expect it's going to get better, because the platform / technology is relatively immature. And I think it matters a lot less today than people who blog about things like this (or those who downvote dissenting comments about things like this rather than trying to be persuasive) might think.
Sure, you're probably right about vendors trying get lock-in, that makes sense. I'm personally curious about what premium we'll end up paying for physical books, like how CDs are no longer the primary music delivery mechanism yet music lovers pay a premium for vinyl.
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, ...
Sure, but the styling has to be semantic or it will end up breaking. I am not sure most non-technical authors even know what the "style" drop-down does on their word processors.
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.
However, we felt that authors would find html easier to write, and designers would find it easier to design in.
Maybe something like restructured text would have been ok to do too. Since it is a python magazine, and many python programmers would know restructured text.
If we make it to another issue, we might think about using a separate toolchain.
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.
Not time, but resources. In this case paying someone to manually set the book's E-edition. My point is that with anything, the publishers decide if paying to manually set the ebook has a better return than spending elsewhere (or not at all).
I think going forward, the publishers will plan for typesetting the print and electronic versions together so the delineation of costs that I mention won't exists. It will all be rolled into the production cost of the book.
My comment is aimed at publishers with piles of books that were set before the existence of ebooks (or with production processes that are slower to change, books in transition). Should the backlog of books be converted to e-books as quickly as possible using a less than ideal processes or should the books be manually re-set with humans thereby delaying their availability?
I think the publishers are trying to optimize based on highest return between typography and availability.
BTW, I would love to see better typography, I don't disagree with that point. I'm just speculating on why it's not happening.
Surely the majority of the typesetting would be done by the e-reader software itself, anyway. Hyphenation, justification, and spacing can be handled almost entirely in software, except perhaps hints for strange words or difficult situations. LaTeX can certainly handle it without help, at least.
> With a little effort, the makers of The Publisher’s digital incarnation could have one-upped the printed book by positioning these photographs to accompany relevant bits of Brinkley’s text, illustrating, e.g., a description of Henry Luce’s childhood with a photo of Luce as a toddler.
I don't know anything about typesetting, but this specific example seems difficult to automate with software. A human would need to decide where best to place these photos.
Again, a guess, but it seems that this book started life in a pre-electronic book production process. To get it right would require more manual effort for the e-book.
Just like websites are evolving to be adaptive/responsive, I think book production will follow. We're just not there yet. Websites are still being launched today that are close to impossible to read on a mobile phone.
In LaTeX, switching between putting all the figures on their own page or putting them inline takes the equivalent of an #ifdef. It's really easy, and doesn't require any special knowledge of typesetting.
Remember, TeX started out with the goal of being able to automate the typesetting of a very large, very complicated multi-volume book (The Art of Computer Programming). Novels are almost too easy, and adding a few pictures to a biography is mostly trivial.
The only way we will get good ebooks is if publisher make the book for HTML/ePub first. They can than export for the page size they are printing and tweak it. They will not put in the work on an already created book to make it re-sizable.
If we're going to get a stop to this, people must complain and demand their money back. I did so with one book I bought from Amazon, were some words consistently had spaces inserted into them e.g. "carry ing".
This is the reason that I choose buy O'reilly e-books from the O'reilly website. They are the only publisher (that I know of) who puts in the effort to make typography in their e-books beautiful.
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?