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Old 11-09-2012, 04:07 PM   #17
Hitch
Bookmaker & Cat Slave
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Posts: 11,447
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Join Date: Apr 2010
Location: Phoenix, AZ
Device: K2, iPad, KFire, PPW, Voyage, NookColor. 2 Droid, Oasis, Boox Note2
Quote:
Originally Posted by theducks View Post
Sorry Hitch

I keep hearing a repeating theme: small, 3" Screen

Grab your Pica stick and a mass market paperback.

Measure a line of text in a normal chapter (margin to Margin): 3.375" inches
If you don't Add extra Margins (the device Bezel/mask, is the 'built in' margins).
That is not much difference in width from Billions of dead tree books sold here in the USA
Ducky:

You know I (heart) you, but for crying out loud, yes, that's true--with approximately 52-56 chars per line. Grab any ePUB, slap it on ADE (or whatever blows your skirt up) and tell me where, exactly, you get 52 characters per line. I'll tell you: nowhere. I generally see ~34 chars per line on a Nook at a medium font size. If I take a typical, simple mobi, and change it to a font-size of "1," I'll get that, on a Fire, and roughly that on an e-ink device--and that's font-size 1. Once you move up to the default of 3, you lose ~10 chars per line. When we were young, it was far more common to have an even greater number of characters per line, but as we all know, the lower common denominator starts to rule the day, and now we have larger print, more whitespace, etc.

My point being, that to me, teeny indents for bq's look odd on lines that are "fatter" in terms of font-size. Yes, we use % or ems, but with screenspace, in my opinion, at a premium, I just think using the visual equivalent of 2chars or 3 chars for an indent for a bq looks odd.

Moreover--and this is what, to my mind, drives the discussion, more than aesthetics, and perhaps I have to be more sensitive to this than many other folks who have the luxury of making books for themselves--readers complain if they think you've wasted space. They either leave bad reviews, or complain to B&N or Amazon. And (me) trying to blame the publisher never works. We are seeing a larger number of people reading on smartphones--to the extent that, if a larger Publisher puts up kids's books, without region magnification (aka "pop-up text"), Amazon will not promote the book because readers can't read it on their smaller tablets and smartphones. So...it's something I'm very aware of, vis-a-vis space.

Regardless, no matter what you do, you're stuck with the "lopsided" indents if you have an older Kindle. It's possible that I've just become so accustomed to looking at one-sided bq's that I don't give it adequate thought, any longer. I'll think about it, since my peeps are giving me crap.

@Man Eating Duck: doesn't using L/R margining with a center give you some odd-looking results? Or did I misunderstand what you meant?

@cybmole: I, too, don't love ragged-right margins, but we get two arguments about it...due to lack of hyphenation in many e-readers, you can get some super-funky looking "rivers of white" when justification is forced; and then many of our authors really want their books to look like print, and desire the full-justification. I think that's a publisher's decision, but we end up changing it about half the time...from what a publisher thinks s/he wants to what they then decide they want after viewing it. {shrug}. As everyone here knows, I mostly like books to look like books, so my personal leaning is toward fully-justified, but I have seen some mighty fugly justification on a Kindle in my day. ;-)

H.
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