ePub or No ePub, That is the Poll

[kovidgoyal]

Personally, I don't care whether text I read is justified or not, not at the small screen sizes I use. Hadrien is right, justification is trivial to implement (at least for a single language) at a programming level (I know, I implemented it for calibre's LRF viewer).

On the other hand, I'm sick of closing tickets about the lack of justification in epub, so I'm *really* beginning to wish Adobe had implemented it.

[mtravellerh]

Well, I for one thing, will implement ePUB now in my book assembling and uploading process from now on.

Pagebreaks on chapters work fine now and TOC is ok, too. There are only a few rules I have to take attention to and ePUB generation via Calibre is relatively trivial via now (big cigar for Kovid!).

There are a few other reasons to make the jump now:

1. My daughter gifted me an Ipod Touch for Xmas (tell you a secret: I make a lot of them books for my reading pleasure)

2. I think Sony and his reader will be relatively big in Germany this year, what with Kindle not present on the german market yet. So epub will be boosted (Libri.de, the biggest german bookstore chain, will sell the Sony 505 and epub ebooks in bookstores and online)

3. Bookeen will provide ePUB support in it's next firmware update (hopefully)

[tompe]

Originally Posted by Hadrien

Justification is a very simple thing to support. Sure it might not look very good on small screens but even in a low ressource environment it's pretty easy to support.

OK. But isn't the idea that a web browser should be able to be used as an ePUB viewer and most web browsers do not implement it (or do they?).

[llasram]

Originally Posted by tompe

OK. But isn't the idea that a web browser should be able to be used as an ePUB viewer and most web browsers do not implement it (or do they?).

(a) I'm not really sure that's the "idea"... It's certainly a big benefit that there's plenty of HTML rendering code already lying around which can be re-purposed into EPUB rendering code, but I think that's more a side-effect of HTML & CSS being mature, widely implemented technologies. (b) Most Web browsers certainly do render "text-align: justify", just not with automatic hyphenation.

[mtravellerh]

Is auto-hyphenation really necessary or even a good thing? I doubt it a bit.
It still is a hit and miss thing, largely, takes up a lot of calculating power and is not THAT effective. If the screen is not too small, text justifies pretty well without the words being hyphenated, generally. There are exceptions to that rule (overlong words jumping to mind here) but all in all things are pretty viable.

[astra]

I don't need auto-hyphenation. I prefer the way sony reader justifies the text on a whole screen.

[tompe]

You must use hyphenation to get a good result. How bad the text will be without hyphenation depends a bit on the language. For example in Swedish you create new words by concatenating two words and no space between them and you get a lot more of longer words then in English.

[nrapallo]

With about a week left, how would you interpret the results of this poll thus far.

I analzyed it on the basis of support for ePub, no (against) ePub or wait and see (maybe).

Attached are my findings for your consideration. Votes For ePub vs No (against) is currently running at almost 2 to 1!

To date, we have 65 .epub uploads to this forum, an increase of at least 3 fold in two weeks (from 18)...

[mtravellerh]

Originally Posted by nrapallo

With about a week left, how would you interpret the results of this poll thus far.

I analzyed it on the basis of support for ePub, no (against) ePub or wait and see (maybe).

Attached are my findings for your consideration. Votes For ePub vs No (against) is currently running at almost 2 to 1!

To date, we have 65 .epub uploads to this forum, an increase of at least 3 fold in two weeks (from 18)...

The increase is mostly due to Jellby and myself, I'm afraid. I do not understand why not more of my fellow book assemblers post their books in epub format with Calibre making such a good work of it.

[vivaldirules]

Lefty: "Well, Hugo?"
Hugo: "Well what?"

[mtravellerh]

Oops, sorry. And vr here present, of course.

[vivaldirules]

Originally Posted by mtravellerh

The increase is mostly due to Jellby and myself, I'm afraid. I do not understand why not more of my fellow book assemblers post their books in epub format with Calibre making such a good work of it.

Well, I don't do it because I don't see the point of the effort. If the Sony Readers are the only ones that currently can read epub and they do that rather poorly (worse than LRF), then there is no immediate need for epub files, as I see it. Once some other devices can read them, I'd be willing to bet that there will be some particular nuance it will have that will mean that the epubs that have been generated already won't be rendered quite as nicely as if you set some particular option or parameter to this or that value. That will mean that they may have to be redone.

For example, many of us were making PRC format ebooks using BookDesigner. But Harry determined a better way to make them so that the illustrations would be displayed better. So now many people are making these with Mobipocket Creator and I need to go back and redo some of the ones I've already made. That's no problem. I'm hoping some people were able to read the ebooks I made anyway.

And then there's the IMP files many of us were making from BookDesigner. Along comes Nick's MOBI2IMP and I'm redoing the files I once made to make them better, too.

I'm not complaining, mind you. But if there is no need to be filled now, why spend the effort to create things that will probably have to be remade later anyway? I don't get that.

[mtravellerh]

Originally Posted by vivaldirules

Well, I don't do it because I don't see the point of the effort. If the Sony Readers are the only ones that currently can read epub and they do that rather poorly (worse than LRF), then there is no immediate need for epub files, as I see it. Once some other devices can read them, I'd be willing to bet that there will be some particular nuance it will have that will mean that the epubs that have been generated already won't be rendered quite as nicely as if you set some particular option or parameter to this or that value. That will mean that they may have to be redone.

For example, many of us were making PRC format ebooks using BookDesigner. But Harry determined a better way to make them so that the illustrations would be displayed better. So now many people are making these with Mobipocket Creator and I need to go back and redo some of the ones I've already made. That's no problem. I'm hoping some people were able to read the ebooks I made anyway.

And then there's the IMP files many of us were making from BookDesigner. Along comes Nick's MOBI2IMP and I'm redoing the files I once made to make them better, too.

I'm not complaining, mind you. But if there is no need to be filled now, why spend the effort to create things that will probably have to be remade later anyway? I don't get that.

Well, I read a lot on my netbook and Calibre renders those epubs really fine. That good enough for you?

What about Ipods and Iphones? I guess there may be more users reading books on Iphones than on hardware readers (but that is just a guess).

Sony launches the 505 in Germany this year and Sony's promotion is anchored on the epub format and the german ebook sellers will sell epubs.

Epub, technically speaking, has the most future potential of all formats.

Mobi and LRF once were in the same situation than epub is now, but did you hesitate to create ebooks?

[llasram]

Originally Posted by vivaldirules

Well, I don't do it because I don't see the point of the effort. If the Sony Readers are the only ones that currently can read epub and they do that rather poorly (worse than LRF), then there is no immediate need for epub files, as I see it.

Three reasons:

(1) OMG is it better than LRF. Having real italics instead of a programmatically slanted font is worth the price of admission alone. Image floats, direct HTML rendering (vs. necessarily incomplete conversion), SVG, etc are just icing on the cake.

(2) Plenty of other readers. Stanza, Calibre, FBReader (er... kind of), and definitely more to come.

(3) Clean clean clean source. If you produce a clean XHTML+CSS source of your book to produce other formats from, you can release that source as the EPUB version. If any else ever wants to convert to any other format, they can just grab the EPUB version and have the cleanest possible source to work from.

[tompe]

Originally Posted by llasram

(3) Clean clean clean source. If you produce a clean XHTML+CSS source of your book to produce other formats from, you can release that source as the EPUB version. If any else ever wants to convert to any other format, they can just grab the EPUB version and have the cleanest possible source to work from.

This is a very important point. I would never spend time formatting something for a dead-end terminal format. I would first invent an exchange format and write converter programs. But since ePub exists I do not have to do this.