Microsoft Typography has done a lot in the area of screen typography. See for instance under About Fonts: TrueType Hinting.

“Also, are there specs online about font support for upcoming devices like Sony Reader?”

See for instance here. Or were you wondering what fonts the Reader will support? Assuming it will display (possibly pre-rendered) PDFs, the answer would be “all”.

I felt the entire interview that the interviewer presupposed an attitude the interviewee (rightly so) did not share.

Sadi, perhaps you and Carl should read Cory Doctorow’s essay Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Books. Carl because of his statement that he cannot “recall a single discussion of e-books that tackles the way e-books are different from printed books, or why, or what possibilities those differences present”; you because of the following:

Back to democratic-ness. Every successful new medium has traded off its artifact-ness — the degree to which it was populated by bespoke hunks of atoms, cleverly nailed together by master craftspeople — for ease of reproduction. Piano rolls weren’t as expressive as good piano players, but they scaled better — as did radio broadcasts, pulp magazines, and MP3s. Liner notes, hand illumination and leather bindings are nice, but they pale in comparison to the ability of an individual to actually get a copy of her own.

Which isn’t to say that old media die. Artists still hand-illuminate books; master pianists still stride the boards at Carnegie Hall, and the shelves burst with tell-all biographies of musicians that are richer in detail than any liner-notes booklet. The thing is, when all you’ve got is monks, every book takes on the character of a monkish Bible. Once you invent the printing press, all the books that are better-suited to movable type migrate into that new form. What’s left behind are those items that are best suited to the old production scheme: the plays that *need* to be plays, the books that are especially lovely on creamy paper stitched between covers, the music that is most enjoyable performed live and experienced in a throng of humanity.

I think for a house like Godine, until a reader can be designed for them, or until the integrity of the type and design can be mastered, then they will stay with print books – at least for now – that may change as standards change and improve, but as to the present moment, i can’t imagine a house that prides itself on typography really getting into e-books at the moment.

That said, typos creep into every book, hopefully and less so with Godine. Dostoevsky once said that a book is not a book unless it contained at least one typo.

Not sure i agree with him, but it’s a great quote.

Thanks for chiming in with your point of view…

be well,

s.r.p.

I think this statement is true. I have purchased many e-books that don’t even take advantage of the simple formatting capabilities some of the file formats provide, but just pour the text in and take whatever the batch converter spits out.

I purchased a copy of “The Restaurant at the End of the Universe” last year, and it was so full of obvious OCR errors that no amount of formatting would cover up.

Perhaps producing an electronic edition of a book is not a work of art the way CWS sees it, but it would be nice to see people take some pride in their presentation.

Most screens have comparatively bad resolution, which leads to fine details of type getting lost, as well as oblique and slanted structures (that can’t be shown well on a coarse orthogonal pixel grid) also getting lost or distorted.

Some recent typefaces were specifically created for the screen, and there is some information about issues and tradeoffs at http://www.will-harris.com/verdana-georgia.htm . The Lucida family (by Bigelow & Holmes) is also well known for having been designed with low-resolution media in mind, and there are typefaces designed to be highly legible under very adverse conditions (say, road signs that need to be legible in bad lighting, bad weather, and bad viewing angles) that also are very useful for screen use (Agfa Bosis Medium, for example).

Recent OpenType typefaces come in various design sizes, one of which is typically designed for small print (6-8 pt), and typically proportionally wider, and with fewer ‘refinements’ than the larger sizes. Using these at normal text sizes (10-12pt) also helps in making texts easier to read on low-resolution screens. (The older Multiple Master technology from Adobe could do the same thing for some typefaces.)

Beside type design, type disposition is at least as important: the screen seem to require larger line spacing to be equally easy to read as a printed text. (This will be an important issue for various ‘reader’ software in the future: do they do adequate line spacing for the typeface and type size the user has selected?)

At the same time, some typographical refinements may not make good sense in text intended for screen reading: thin spaces may not be at all visible on screen, for instance.

However, an e-book (say, in PDF format) designed to be read on screen, using large and clear typefaces and extra spacing etc will look pretty odd when it is printed out on a high-resolution printer: it will look more like a book for beginning readers, and so may put ordinary readers off. Some modern pocket books show this: the type is unexpectedly large, possibly to offset the fairly low quality (’resolution’) of the paper used, although I suspect text bulk inflation is an important sale factor as well.

The transition from the relatively slowly printed book on fine paper to high-speed printed newspapers on considerably less fine paper showed a similar change: typefaces for newspapers became ‘clearer’ and less detailed to survive the printing process. The transition to the screen as ‘print medium’ is a continued development of this process. (And typefaces designed for newspaper use are also often effective on screen, e.g. Linotype Excelsior).

High-resolution screens are beginning to appear — though electrophoretic paper (such as the E Ink electronic paper used in the Sony Reader and the iRex iLiad devices) will probably not change much at first: even if resolution improves (from 90dpi to approx 160 dpi), it looks as if contrast suffers, and so the need for ‘clear’ type will remain, even if disposition issues may change.

As far as I know there seems to be no conscious creation of beautiful e-books (I would love to be proven wrong). To some extent this is due to many display issues being left to the ‘reader’ software, which rarely seems to be designed by people with typographical skills, though some basic points are beginning to show, such as the need for good hyphenation and avoidance of widows. Also many e-book creators seem only too happy to leave the ‘old dead-tree typography’ behind, and reinvent a new wheel from scratch. It’s a pity: it sets the bar of acceptance lower than it needs to be.

Laserdiscs are still with us. They’re just called “DVDs” now, and they are doing phenomenal business.

NeXT computers are also still with us. Only now they’re called “Macintosh”, and Apple Computer is selling more of them than ever before.

I’m not bullish on eBooks as a medium, but I think some form of electronic distribution of the written word is inevitable – more so than we have today. While I agree that electronic works are more useful for reference material *today*, that may not be the case forever.

Certainly people who appreciate a well-made book will continue to pay for well made books. I will be one of those people for the rest of my life. But I don’t necessarily need a high-end production job for whatever crap novel the big publishing houses dump onto shelves this week. I think the electronic book for leisure reading will replace the disposable paperback, but only when the economics of it make sense for the consumer.

The crux of the issue seems to me to be that two different markets
are being described in this interview: the market for the content of
a book, and the market for the book as a piece of art. While these
may overlap, they are certainly not one and the same.

E-books shine in the market where content is king; the advantages
of compact storage, searchable text, annotation without damaging
the original, etc. all leverage the ability to manipulate content.
As a physical work of art, however, e-books are extremely limited:
some control of font and graphic elements is possible, but
restricted; engagement of haptic and olfactory senses is almost
non-existent (unless you have an overheating e-book reader!) and
generally not under the control of the publisher — it will even
vary by which device the reader uses (think of reading on an iLiad
vs. a PalmPilot).

A book as a physical work of art offers a distinct experience where
the artist — the publisher — can control aspects such as size,
format, texture, material, etc. to a great degree, manipulating the
medium to accentuate particular sensations in the reader. To express
this another way, compare the experience of seeing a Jackson Pollock
painting in person vs. a picture of one on your computer.

If, as a publisher, your mission is to create a physical work of
art, then e-books naturally have little place in your product line.
As a businessperson, this may be a restrictive approach; as an
artist, it is little different than choosing to work in oils vs.
computer graphics. I think there is always a market for works of
art, as long as economic conditions can support it; it isn’t likely
to be a growing market, but one can make a living at it. The
challenge from a business perspective is then one of reaching your
entire target market efficiently, not one of expanding your customer
base to new markets.

That said, I think there is still a place for e-books within the
publisher who is creating books as physical art. The simplest might
be advertising: for example, an e-book of the content, but with an
advertisement before the content. “Imagine these poems bound in
silk, artwork by such-and-so! Slipcased limited edition!” etc. etc.
Another was hinted at in the interview: preservation of content.
An artist can create only so many works of art, but may have more
valuable content than can be distributed in this form; at least
the content can be preserved for posterity, perhaps so that some
future book-artist can create around it.

We might ask the question, can an e-book present itself as a physical
work of art? I think the answer is yes, much in the same way that we
have computer graphics as works of art; but it is a particular medium,
with different constraints and potential than a physical book. For
example, one could imagine layers of annotation that create an
aesthetic effect, an artform not replicable in a book. Sliding into
the realm of science fiction, we can imagine that someday we will have
a sufficiently powerful virtual reality that engages all the senses;
an e-book as an artform might then be quite powerful. But for the
publisher-artist, the choice of medium is an individual decision.

Just some thoughts!

–John N.

On a completely different topic: CWS said

To be honest, I’m deeply suspicious of pronouncements like [e-books are the future of books]. Remember … NeXT computers?

To be fair, the NeXT computer is currently better known as Apple’s Mac computer, and is reasonably popular. The next release of Microsoft Windows is widely thought to be imitating many aspects of it. Saying that it was the “future of personal computers” isn’t too far off the mark.

First, the concerns of the two worlds are different. The packaging/design of a p-book is essentially marketing for the book itself. Picking up the book and flipping through the pages is a way to let the reader in a bookstore know what the book is about (although fonts probably impact the actual reading experience itself). But there is no ebook at a bookstore to pick up and inspect. All we have is the amazon page and perhaps a sample page and cover art. It’s not clear whether design for ebooks fulfills the same purpose of marketing the book itself. Ebook design has to do more with navigation and organization of content than style (although obviously both are related). To add value, ebooks have to be designed in a way to allow different kinds of navigation from p-books (in terms of searching, indexing, sequence of reading).

Another problem is consistency among platforms. Individual ebook software platforms are doing innovative things (see dotreader’s annotation feature), but the need to maintain consistency among platforms tends to discourage the use of these advanced features. There are parallels with the early days of CSS. Unless you were willing to do separate designs for different browsers, you had to use kludges and use only the most basic CSS features.

That said, Adobe Reader has lots of advanced features (video, flash) that might justify separate design work (especially if future reading devices support PDF). It remains to be seen whether PDAs will be capable of supporting these advanced features in Adobe Reader.

I do, however, feel that this is a whole segment of the market that Godine is missing and could benefit from. It may not be their readership/ customer base at the moment, but it would or could create a whole new customer base and i see everything good in that and it would be a win-win situation. But again, the big publishers have gone that way – small presses seem more reluctant… as to the exact Whys, i think again, CS addressed that issue for Godine specifically, but this is fodder for a healthy debate to be sure. Check out their site http://www.godine.com and get a sense of what they do publish and check the backlist…. that might make things clearer.

Also, i’m not sure about how images would translate – you’d need some calibration program to get the images perfect and i’m not clear that we yet have that technology such that the image appears the same on all hand-held browsers – which would be a sticking point for a house that places a premium on quality control and perfection — a thing that has made Godine the great house that it is today. In short, the customer base so far has come to expect a certain quality and that quality is a high one.

Still, again, i personally think it would be worth pursuing the e-book angle for at least the back-list, text-only books —

I doubt we’ve heard the last from Godine on this matter.

Thanks – be well,

s.r.p.

But yes, you’re right.

thanks for reading – s.r.p.