TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘typography’ Category

By Paul Biba

This evening I had a press event to attend in the New York, so I thought I’d go in early and see the Morgan Library and Museum. Even though I lived in New York for many years, and go in several times a month, I’d never visited it before.

Pierpont Morgan was an avid book collector and collected rare first editions from all over the world. The museum part of the collection is fairly small and you can traverse it in about an hour and a half. It is well worth seeing. After the break I’ll hit some of the highlights that I saw, and missed, today.

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By Chris Meadows

In my post about the Espresso book machine, I mentioned a non-profit organization called Public Domain Reprints and promised to review the book I had ordered as soon as it arrived.

As it happens, I actually have not read The Crystal Stopper in quite a while, so the review will not focus on the story within it (though it is worth mentioning that it is an excellent and suspenseful tale of high adventure with French literature’s best-known master thief). What interests me is the construction and presentation of the book itself.

Finding the Book

The ordering process starts by going to Public Domain Reprints’s website and searching on the book or author you want to reprint. The search process is a bit…problematic. It’s an embedded search, powered by Google, and searches both the Internet Archive and Google Books to find the result.

Each result is presented with a bold blue link to the work itself, and a "Request a Reprint" link below it. At the bottom is a list of pages of results, as well as a "More Results" link.

The problem is, the search doesn’t work very well. First of all, it is fairly inaccurate. I typed in "Maurice Leblanc" both with and without quotation marks and found a whole lot of books unrelated to what I was looking for.

Second, the links are confusing. If I click on the big bold blue link for the book I want, I expect to be taken to a page where I can order it. Instead, I get the book itself on Google Books (or presumably the Internet Archive, though I did not find any results there). I would have to click the smaller, unassuming "Request a Reprint" link below the result to get to the order page. This might be too confusing for unwary users.

Still on the subject of links, the results page numbers at bottom take you to more pages of results in the embedded search—but the "More results" link takes you away from publicdomainreprints.org entirely, to the Google Books search homepage. And while you can certainly find the book you want there, you cannot order a reprint of it from there.

I ended up having to go to the Google Books native search page, do an Advanced Search, and copy the query syntax it generated ("inauthor:Maurice inauthor:Leblanc date:0-1923"), then take that back to the publicdomainreprints.org page to get what I wanted: a list of books by Maurice Leblanc that were out of copyright.

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By Jon Noring

Over four years ago I published an eBookWeb article entitled “OEBPS: The Universal Consumer eBook Format?”

Unfortunately, due to eBookWeb going defunct (a casualty of the “E-book Dark Ages” that resulted after the dotcom collapse), that article has essentially disappeared from the Internet.

So I am reposting the eBookWeb article here, not only for preservation purposes, but because its themes are stil very relevant today as will be briefly explained in this foreword.

DeLorean jokes

When I wrote that article, e-books were considered a lot like the DeLorean automobile — weird and impractical — the butt of many jokes. The DeLorean even played a prominently silly role in the movie trilogy Back To The Future.

But times have changed! Just as Google News is full of articles about an entrepreneur reviving the gull-wing-doored, stainless steel automobile to an enthusiastic public, so too e-books are finally being noticed and bought by an enthusiastic public. E-book sales are growing at a fast rate.

My 2003 article had three, closely related themes:

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By Robert Nagle

Do you want a way to download the new Vista cleartype fonts without upgrading? According to Matt Thomas, if you download the free Power Point 2007 viewer onto XP, it includes the 6 new vista fonts. That’s right; once you download the viewer, you can use the fonts in Office applications and view the fonts in the browser. Poynter Online has a user’s guide to the Vista fonts. Christian Montoya has suggestions for css substitutions.

User comments indicate some lack of support for these fonts (which are Opentype fonts) on Firefox on Mac (Firefox on Windows is ok). Already, according to Codestyle.org, 15-20% of Windows users have these Vista fonts installed on their system.

For typography fanatics, here’s an hour long downloadable video interview with Bill Hill of Microsoft about how MS uses cleartype fonts to enhance the user experience. Here are some quantitative findings mentioned in the video by Kevin Larson of MS Advanced Reading Technology division:

• performance enhancements: improved speed of recognition accuracy: 17% more accurate
• more natural tasks: sentence comprehension: 5% faster with cleartype; 2% more accurate.
• when people read an article lasting more than 5 screens, they read faster with cleartype, with a speed advantage on every page.
• finding/searching tasks in the real world: 7% increase in speed in real world tasks.

Here’s Kevin Larson’s research about the science of perception and word recognition. Kevin Larson keeps an intermittent blog about font research and tips.

See also this podcast discussion about why web typography sucks (mp3) (from SXSW).