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Originally Posted by ApK
But it seems, judging by Amazon's success and effect on the ereader industry, the "vast majority" of what readers want in their e-reading experience is already accommodated by even the smaller subset of feature that mobi offers on eink devices.
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Amazon wins on convenience, has a large advertising budget and sells a cheap device. I don't think those points are being debated here, but I don't really think they have a relevance to the desirability of having a platform with more typographic sophistication.
Obviously the average reader doesn't think much about the design of the books they purchase. They shouldn't have to worry about the minutiae of how the book is laid out. Good typography is typography that disappears and
doesn't call attention to itself, so this is something that people shouldn't have to think about. But
getting that to happen requires a knowledge of proper practices and attention to detail to make sure that all the elements work together behind the scenes in a cohesive and elegant manner.
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I would argue that there is far greater volume of work that is better served by a fixed layout (all the "...For Dummies" books come immediately to mind...I've now officially given up trying to read "Chess for Dummies" on my Kindle) than would be substantively served by only those features that ePub offers over mobi, as nice to have as they might be.
Put another way, when you are talking about works that are seriously diminished by lack of embeddable fonts and certain kinds of indents, or certain nested table structures, then you are most probably talking about complex designs.
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The 'For Dummies' books are, frankly, generally not that complex, and most of the styling, callouts and sidebars they use can easily be rendered in ePub by someone who understands how to use the code.
I think the ePub standard is far from perfect and needs to develop further. But the future of electronic books lies in having a standard that's
more capable and not trying to reduce everything to the level of a mediocre specification that was designed for tiny screens fifteen years ago and has been almost untouched since then.
Now we're done.