TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Osrandil has it right. He wants to reproduce the printed page exactly. He should be using PDF.

If he does want to use HTML, he shouldn’t be using horrid double column javascript (hardly “standard HTML and CSS3″). He should have been using CSS float-right for the image.

As for mixing absolute point sizes and pixel dimensions – ugh. I suspect he’s made the assumption that 1pt == 1px, which is definitely not true in all situations.

and what ebook reader does not default to a format thats even worsely parsed across platforms then html? epub is html mobi is an old version of html, azw is based on mobi so this leaves PDF doesnt it?

His problem is that he is treating the web as if it was pdf, this is btw what i was able to do in 5 minutes playing http://dudsen.dk/misc/book.png
had i had the correct fonts installed i would probably have gotten what he was after.

It can be done if you actually understand your limitations but browsers are never going to put a author in full control of the entire experience. the browser mostly looks like the user want it to those days, and definately not like the web page wanted W3C have always rejected proposals to make that happen.

ohh and btw the lack of perfect formatting control were the main reason wry aol and MSN were going to have taken over the internet by now.

The old saying comes to mind: “Freedom of the press belongs to those that own one.”
Very last century.
And very out of touch with modern reality.
On the web and in proper ebook readers the ultimate word in presentation belongs to the reader; font face and size, line spacing and columns, those are decisions that *properly* belong to the consumer.
Readability is in the eye of the beholder and in a world flooded with alternatives and drowning in channels, information is not a gift from the publishing gods that has to be taken as they deem fit.
Electronic publishing is *not* about faking ink on paper; it is about making information in all its forms accessible.
Those who believe appearances matter more than the substance of the message are headed for a very harsh crash landing.

What Felix said. In spades, hearts, diamonds, green clovers, and little yellow moons.

The more I think about this, the more I’m reminded about the early days of the automobile industry:
In the very early days (and at the high end, well into the 30’s) many of the early manufacturers contracted with established carriage builders to design and build their vehicles’ bodies. As time went on the manufacturers started to realize that automobiles were *not* really horseless carriages but were an entirely new class of transportation. In the process they realized they didn’t need carriage builders to design their vehicle bodies and that, in fact, they could make a better/cheaper/more popular product if they did the design themselves.

People like to believe their skills and talents are valuable and nobody likes to accept that their skills are anything but current and relevant. But times change. And the added-value equation for electronic media skews very differently from the print media era. Accesibility ruless in the new era. Accessibility and user choice.
Ebooks without question need at least a modicum of typographic and presentation formatting skill but that skill belongs in the display application not in the file or even the file format specification.
My expectation is that now that ebook readers are becoming a true consumer product the industry leaders will be the ones that offer the consumer the best experience. And in modern terms, that means giving consumers what they are used to: control. All it takes is one supplier doing it…
And consumer control means that if consumers want to read their books in Comic Book Sans, no amount of teeth grinding by professionals is going to prevent it.
The times they are changing, not for the first time.
As somebody said: “this has happened before and it will happen again”.

Traditionally, the smart way to deal with these sea-change transitions is for the professionals to get in front of the transition and go with the flow. In this case, instead of griping about how inadequate web and electronic-publishing tools are for producing static formats, they should be lending their expertise (while it still has value) to the software developers coding the rendering engines and ereader apps so they can encapsulate the rules of “proper” typographic presentation and deliver aestheticly-pleasing output dynamically, on-the-fly, in accordance to the consumer’s general or specific desires.

Again: reading is not about books (or newspapers).
Its about the experience. The reader matters.
The balance of power has shifted, irrevocably and happily, from the producers and distributors to the consumers.
They need to accept this and adapt or they will surely die.

Roger,

Perhaps you are right, and I’ll be the first to step up to the plate to tell you LIT is GORGEOUS. Like, orgasmically gorgeous.

But if you can tell me an ebook reading device in wide use that reads it, I’ll eat my hat.

The point of ebooks is not typography. It’s content. People who buy and read ebooks know that. They only care about the most basic of formatting (chapter heads, ToC, paragraph spacing, and line height, to name a few) to make it easy for them to read. And, oh, that it be adjustable by the customer with regard to font size. Rigid typography takes that flexibility (which is one huge reason people use ebook reading devices) and gives the reader a bad experience.

Please remember: It’s about the READER.

Bill Hill may be a software guru, but he clearly doesn’t understand web design. No offense to his expertise on typography and ebooks, but the layout he’s trying to repro in that post is not a very complicated one to achieve, pixel for pixel, on the web, cross-browser too. I would argue with the superiority of Cleartype versus Quartz font rendering. I would also question the “web expertise” at hand here. First of all, the implication of using CSS3 is that you are immediately going to go up against shortchanged implementations in all browsers. CSS2 is the hard reality of web design at this time. Secondly, Javascript is a necessity these days on the web, mainly because it’s the only way to produce consistent rendering across browsers, and he doesn’t even give it a reach-around. Finally, single site browsers and full screen capability are right around the corner. Bill Hill seems to miss the point that “web browser” does not just refer to the button-laden resizable windows with all your other tabs in them. And shame on you, Paul, for elevating his post to this level of importance with your introduction.

Paul,

I think I understand with your point of view and I agree with portions of it. But I think you may be giving BillHill too much credit here. I don’t think his article mentioned “portrait” at all. My impression was of someone who wants the reader only to use his precise layout, compromising not at all for different platforms.

And sure, there’s certainly merit in that argument, but I feel that’s the point of view of a write who treats every aspect of the book as an essential part of the artistic expression. Other authors clearly feel that the text is the important part, so the medium should only be optimized to get in the way as little as possible.

I generally agree with the latter for the fiction I like to read, but I appreciate that certain types of books work better at the other end of the spectrum.

(and, to be a little snarky: yeah, his web-production skills aren’t exactly top-knotch, and Papyrus is… not the most readable font out there..)