A great story about your father. Something to think about–when the Japanese began selling cars in the US, they offered their cars at a discount to what Detroit was selling. They did so, even though their cars were of significantly higher quality. Why did they do it? Because American consumers were unaware of the quality differential and had to be persuaded to try something new.

I think the eBook experience has some aspects in common with that.

Rob Preece
Publisher, http://www.BooksForABuck.com

NB: Women avoiding science fiction may not be because women aren’t interested in science and speculative fiction. It might be because most science fiction has a notable lack of female characters. After all, romance that leans toward science fiction in tone and setting is a thriving sub-genre.

What?????

A move to ebooks eliminates the need/costs of production/printing/binding/warehousing/shipping/returns/remaindering/etc. and you feel that a few byproducts of reading a book via an electronic device (changing a font size is something a publisher feels should bring him more money???)is justification for charging MORE?

It is still early days in e-book development. It is not going away anytime soon, the whole evolution of digital technology dictates its eventual triumph.

Meanwhile, we are stuck with the problem of how to develop things and which direction they should follow.

EPUB is not only an open format, it is capable of development in practically any direction, including PDF generation, p-paper printing, aural renditions and various levels of reflow. It does not do this at the moment, but as a format it is more envelope than contents, which is a good thing.

I believe the real question is not either/or, but how to have both forms together in the one publication.

As for ‘it keeps jobs for designers’ I say (and this may sound harsh) that the designers need to suck it up and adapt with the times. The marketplace grows and evolves and changes. I read a novel set in pre-WW1 Poland, and they had people in the village whose actual job it was to carry water or deliver milk or clear the streets of hay every morning. All of those jobs are now obsolete. Or how about the manufacturers of clothes-wringing machines? They had to either learn to build electric ones or go out of business.

I am not anti-book. There are definitely certaint ypes of books I do prefer to buy in paper and always will. That includes not only graphics-heavy things like cookbooks but also plain-vanilla prose fiction (if the book is a cherished favourite, I do enjoy having a print copy). But for fairly disposable mystery/romance/reads of the day bestseller type stuff, I prefer E because I can read it and get rid of it (or keep it should I wish, and not have to worry about storing so many one-off reads in my smallish apartment). And for that kind of thing, it frustrates me when needless barriers are put up. Do you really think Nora Roberts cares what font size I am using? Wouldn’t she rather get her newest book in as many hands as possible while the fire is hot?

Take a history book where indexing, footnotes, illustrations, diagrams, glossaries etc., plus typographical tables in the form of genealogies and coherent typography is critically important and not amendable to ad hoc changes made haphazardly.

Consider Beowulf in Anglo-Saxon, with a glossary and two or three different translations that may be read concurrently, or Chaucer with references etc.,.

Restrict e-books to novels and light fiction only and it is unnecessarily doomed to trivial entertainment (eg an annotated Jane Austin, is not easily amendable to any form of user preference, if the annotation is to be useful).

PS I am not making any argument for PDF, but rather a fuller and more versatile form of CSS within the EPUB format.

Jon Jermey, unfortunately with more complex publications layout can be an essential part of its readability. Narratives are the simplest form to typeset, unless used for study they are simply read from beginning to end and in a sense every part has the same and equal value. Not so with other non-fiction works (and I am not talking about decorative graphic eye-candy).

I later learned that using baby spinach instead of mixed baby greens (with the purple) will give the smoothie a much happier vibrant green color. Having swapped the ingredients, I find people are much more willing to try it and admit liking it and no longer have the tastes-as-healthy-as-it-looks fear.

So for my understanding of the argument, the publishers feel they have to make it look pretty because the (majority of potential) customers will otherwise be hesitant to try something new. It’s certainly not true, but there’s a mindset that production values reflect the quality of the product. I’m sure I could dig up some sociology studies that show how people’s presumptions about and perceptions of a product’s quality are affected by presentation, but I’m too lazy right now, and I think (hope) that the point is kinda clear.

See, this is where I am not following the whole “Yay, PDF” argument. I don’t understand this ‘need’ you allege the publishers have. If I am sitting at the hairdresser without my glasses and I can’t make the font go bigger, it is not aesthetically pleasing. If I am not able to reflow the text to fit the screen of my reader, it is not typograpically coherent. Why do you say the publisher has this ‘need’ and what benefit do they derive from it when it so obviously can’t be a factor in a digital marketplace? I am just baffled by this whole argument, and I really don’t see why JK Rowling or Stephen King or whomever should care if I want my Harry Potter or The Shining in 14 pt or 10 pt—or, sometimes in 14 pt AND sometimes in 10. Unless the book in question is some sort of illustrated art edition where they want us to see the pictures, who cares? Someone explain this to me. This whole ‘need’ you say the publishers have makes no logical sense to me at all.

As a feature the ability to make a User’s stylesheet is very much welcome, however it needs to be balanced against the publisher’s need to present the publication typographically coherent and aesthetically pleasing. Moreover, that means the publisher needs a better stylesheet system than those currently available (CSS can suffice, but in a more modular and dynamic way).

The problem with leaving too much to the reader software and the reader, is that some publication may well need to use flexible XML rather than HTML and the tag sets may be extensive and unpredictable. However if we think this one out clearly we could well have the best of both worlds.

Certain elements, no matter what they are called, are common: Fonts families, headers, footers, footnotes, page, margins, paragraphs, macro divisions (chapters, sections, parts). These need only declare their element sets, to deliver to the user a subset that can be predictable changed, so long as the stylesheets supplied by the publisher are well designed to begin with.

We have a fair way yet to go before reflowing e-books take on a definite and long-lived form.

Not that many years ago, book publishing, for reasons of paper-costs, included photographs as a separate plates’ section inserted where text-page imposition dictated. In-text illustrations had to be included only as line-illustrations and, for the most part, placed somewhere before or after the text reference to them.

The point being that readers adapted to the new, but technically convoluted, form of publishing which is still practised. It was not replaced, in other words, by glossy-page fully illustrated books. It remains a workable solution if not a perfect one.

To make an analogy to this example, the graphic e-book is best served (though not absolutely) by PDF or something similar – a given page size and fixed text.

On the other hand, the other type of e-book is text, rather than graphically based – that will nor change nor will it be shifted by any other form of communications. Writing, not graphics, remains the supreme means of conveying concepts with accuracy and unambiguously to a reader. Everything is secondary to that, no publishable graphic can replace that basic attribute of the written word and its supremacy in terms of human knowledge.

The question is not whether or not this form of text-centric publishing should be reflowable, countless editions of the same works in p-books have been reflowed into a variety of page and text sizes, much to the endless frustration of those trying to locate page references to different editions.

The question is how should it be reflowed, especially when parts of the publication (tables, formulas, text graphics, diagrams etc.,.) are typographically coherent and should be displayed differently according to how the text in the main is displayed. Here the problem with stylesheets as they have now developed (CSS) has distinct limits and needs to approached differently to how it is now implemented.

Ideally for reading and for justifying text etc., text should aim to be about 72 letters per line. However, display and text size will rarely meet this ideal. At one stage or another of “magnification” justified text needs to revert to left aligned, various typographical elements need to be treated differently, pictures may have to be separated and shown in landscape despite the device being read in portrait. In other words, aside from the more “artistic” concerns, there are mundane typographical concerns that no reader software should be allowed to solve for itself without specific instruction.

That is the problem; creating an interactive relationship between the device, users preference and stylesheets. It presents itself not just as an interface problem (which could be easily solved – ie micro-display + small text, as against micro-display + extra-large text), but also as a reference problem to parts within element tags. I would bring one other useful element into the picture – SVG not just as graphic element, but also as “template”, especially for complex tables, where text can via the particular stylesheet be flowed in some sensible way (ie alternative SVGs for different sizes being employed).

My point here is the debate between fixed and flowing text models is misplaced – graphic publications have to assume some fixed proportion and relative size, that can be compromised by smart readers, but will never be completely satisfactory so long as different needs and devices, now or in the future (with the possible exception of fold-out or other another expandable display technology – it may be some time before an A2 display can be folded up into A6).

Text publications (with or without illustrations) is another question, but it needs a lot of development to be be truly suitable for reading, as against monitor browsing for which it was initially designed.

I repeat, that nothing now or promised by the most vivid imagination is about to supplant the written word for concise, precise and unambiguous publication of knowledge and serious thought. We should not get the graphic magazine mixed up with the serious tome, they are two very different things.

With a few tweaks to support graphics and minor formating fixes, this appears to be a usable system–and the price is right.

I’m going to do a bit more experimenting before I add ePub to my assortment of supported formats, but as I offer HTML already, any user wanting to read in ePub could use this as is.

Rob Preece
Publisher, http://www.BooksForABuck.com