Quote:
Originally Posted by stoogeswoman
On the other hand, when all the books look the same and the writers can't depend on flashy covers to grab potential readers, maybe they'll just have to "up" the quality of their writing, and we'll see a whole new era of terrific literature.
There's always another way to look at these things.
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I don't entirely agree.
Layout and design of the book is important and plays an underlying quiet role in our engagement with reading. Sure, most of the books I read are entirely text but that doesn't mean the consideration of white space, font typeface, font size, layout, kerning and so forth doesn't matter. They do but not necessary at the domain of comprehension. Rather, they play a role in the domain of comfortability and visual aesthetics.
This is why I much prefer the PDF format of a digital book, if the PDF format is faithful to the way the printed book looks like. I'm not taking about printing PDF pages from HTML versions of books. That's not being faithful to the original book design. I find basically the other formats unable to be faithful to design considerations. I agree with the article that e-books in general are unattractive.
As someone who has done design and layout of newsletters and books (but certainly not to the degree or expertise of a professional artisanal printer) I can tell you that it's not easy figuring out what type of font, layout, spacing, kerning and so forth that one should use. And if you leave that option too widely open to the inexperienced user, you get very ugly layouts. That's why the flexibility of the other formats in allowing a user to choose whatever font they like does not appeal to me one single bit. It is akin to placing the expertise of laying out text and page design (which is certainly an art) to a seven-year old who thinks s/he excels in finger painting and thus should now be able to make Van Gogh paintings. For that reason, I find it absolutely no appeal to be able to substitute one font of a digital book for another from the user-level perspective.
In other posts, I mentioned that 100% of my digital book collection is in PDF format. These are the reasons why. All my PDF books are faithful to the original design of the printed book itself.