Can't eBooks be beautiful if they're not designed?

[Logseman]

I was reading this CNET article about the W3C (Web standards authority) and the IDFP (EPUB authority) will merge to create a "Portable Web Publication" format which should make it easier to embed rich content in ebook format as it would be a pure website instead of a bastardised one.

What called my attention was not the news article itself, though, but the top comment:

Without any competition on e-readers, there's little motivation to make the experience better for the end-user. The standards for maximum portability has sucked the art and soul out of everything that makes a book a book. No wonder most still prefer a print version -- design is a complete afterthought.

I also didn't notice any specific mention of the publishers in the article. From what I can see, the content creators and artists have essentially left the delivery of their finished work in the hands of hardware and software programmers.

Then, in another news piece, I read this:

Originally Posted by Mike Perry, Inkling Books

Ebooks aren’t growing more popular because ebooks are ugly. It is that simple. Even worse, with but one exception, nothing can be done about that. The standards (epub, mobi, and KF8) are awful and don’t allow ebooks to be attractively done.

And behind much of the problem is the vile Palm Pilot Syndrome (PPS). When ebooks first began to appear on Palm devices, their appearance on that tiny LCD screen was awful. Seeking to make the best of a bad idea, much was made of the fact that someone could change the font size. Yeah, you could choose to have that ugly book in a little font size or a large one, as if that made something bad into something good.

PPS then locked the ebook creating and reading mentality into various bad ideas:

1. Ugly is OK. Ugly is normal. Ugly is not to be fixed. Ugly is.

2. The reader determines the formatting not the publisher. Yeah, that meant they get to change one ugly to a different ugly, including later changing the font rather than the font size. People like that? When I get a book, I want to read it not klutz with how it looks.

It's true that it would seem that ebooks have reached a plateau, and that Amazon seems to keep a stranglehold in the market. However, the point that "design is an afterthought" and that "ebooks are ugly" made me think. When we talk about "design", it's necessarily about "creation" of a thing. However, when we read a book we're usually not trying to read a created experience, are we? Is there simply no way for eBooks to be beautiful without things like the font type being chosen for us?

[Cinisajoy]

What does the quote you quoted have to do with the actual article?
It makes no sense as it is obvious the commenter thinks that all ereaders are the same.
The second one is a blog, not a news article.

I have personally found very pretty ebooks.

So CNET is talking about the creation of ebooks.
The others are talking about the finished product and that people are stuck with whatever the publisher wants.
2 totally different things.

[eschwartz]

Mike Perry (commenting on the article in the second link, which is broken BTW) is apparently an idiot. 'nuf said.

In his perfect world of frosted snowflakes, readers care about where in a paragraph the new page starts. Also, apparently they care about how ugly quotation margins look on a two-inch screen vs. a five-inch screen.


Personally I'm in it for the words moving out of the book and into my mind.
The words of the author are where the beauty lies.

[Cinisajoy]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

Mike Perry (commenting on the article in the second link, wich is broken BTW) is apparently an idiot. 'nuf said.

In his perfect world of frosted snowflakes, readers care about where in a paragraph the new page starts. Also, apparently they care about how ugly quotation margins look on a two-inch screen vs. a five-inch screen.


Personally I'm in it for the words moving out of the book and into my mind.
The words of the author are where the beauty lies.

Have I mentioned I love your brain lately?

[eschwartz]

Yes, you mentioned your zombielike fixation on my gray matter.

[rkomar]

There is no design that someone doesn't think is ugly. At least ereaders let you disable some kinds of ugly if it's important to you. Losing control of the layout entirely would enrage some portion of readers for each ebook.

[tomsem]

Compelling 'dynamic and interactive' experiences are expensive to develop, and this collaboration to develop standards is unlikely to change that property, and getting vendors to build out an ebook platform to support that is a non-starter.

There are these things called 'apps', and they have been around for awhile. Apps can and often do use web technologies quite freely, and there are a number of cross-platform frameworks for doing this. I don't see the need for 'PWP'.

[darryl]

There is a lot of fud around, and unfortunately it appears the OP has succumbed to it. I agree with the points made in reply. In particular, the fact that I can customise the layout to some extent on all my ereaders is so valuable to me that I would prefer ebooks over paper books whenever possible for this alone. I am yet to find a printed book where I can alter even part of the layout to my liking, other than destructively in the case where such a book is really that bad.

But what I really want to do is make yet one more attempt to slay what seems to be the currently most prevalent zombie meme. In this incarnation, the OP says "ebooks have reached a plateau". In fact, ebooks seem to go from strength to strength, except of course in the case of Big 5 Ebooks, where deliberate over-pricing has produced the result expected. Some people do seem to be buying print books instead, aided by Amazon discounting some of those books to the degree that a hard cover is sometimes around the same price or in some cases even cheaper than the ebook. It would seem, however, that many people are just turning to the Indie/Self-Publishing market for their ebooks instead. The limited statistics which the press are so fond of relying on for stories like this use date that excludes most of the Indie/Self-Published Market. No such statistics or the date relied upon by them are perfect, but the Author Earnings reports seem to come closest.

I also feel compelled to comment on the nonsense about ebook formats not catering for tyhe creation of so-called beautiful ebooks. All the tools are there. There are members of this forum who produce ebooks professionally. Off the top of my head Hitch comes to mind. I have confidence that her and others can produce real works of art in existing formats, though, of course, not at bargain basement prices. I suspect the reason there are few elaborately beautiful ebooks, if this is in fact true, is because there is little demand for them.

[DiapDealer]

Physical or electronic: I don't believe in beautiful books (with regard to their construction and/or layout). I only believe in books that are constructed competently (or not). The beauty is in the knowledge, the messages, the stories, and the prose they contain.

That's no disrespect to conscientious ebook makers either. Bad formatting sticks out like a sore thumb, great formatting disappears.

[meeera]

When I'm reading books like novels, I just want the "design" to get the hell out of my way. An in-theme, discreet scene separator graphic or chapter header is fine, but otherwise, just write competent, basic markup.

[GeoffR]

The majority of ebooks I have read started out ugly, but luckily it usually only takes a few minutes with a text editor to fix the publisher's blunders and make the ebook beautiful.

If I wasn't able to repair the ebooks myself though, then I probably would have gone back to reading paper books by now.

[Phogg]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

Physical or electronic: I don't believe in beautiful books (with regard to their construction and/or layout). I only believe in books that are constructed competently (or not). The beauty is in the knowledge, the messages, the stories, and the prose they contain.

That's no disrespect to conscientious ebook makers either. Bad formatting sticks out like a sore thumb, great formatting disappears.

That is undebatably a gross ooverstatement.

I have more than half of these in my bedroom bookcase.

[darryl]

@DiapDealer and @meera. Exactly.

[bgalbrecht]

I find I rarely agree with Mike Perry, including this time. I almost never use the "use publisher settings" option on my reader. Either I have an issue with the fonts, the publisher's layout assumes a font size I don't like, the margins are atrocious or some other reason causes me to flip back to my preferred ereader settings. Perhaps if I were reading works with a lot of embedded illustrations or something with a lot of special fonts (for example, if China Mieville's Embassytown had used specially created fonts), I might want to use the publisher's settings, but that's about it. The fact of the matter is that you can't create an epub that looks uniformly great on all readers. Color, greyscale, margins, etc, all come into play and as someone else said, no design is going to please everyone. Should you even try? YES! But don't do it by creating wonky html and CSS that makes it fail on just about every reader but your favorite one. Make it easy for me to override your font, font size and margins. Oh, and feel free to fix those typos, grammatical errors and glaring plot holes while you're at it!

[ekbell]

It's true that no ebook I've read is as beautiful as some of the well designed pbooks I've read.

It's also true that most of the pbooks I actually own are worn and battered things where the only beauty to be found is in the writing itself. Most of the ebooks I've bought are better looking if only because they're not in danger of losing covers and splitting spines.