Quote:
Originally Posted by Ankh
Sorry for misunderstanding, I should have been more precise.
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Not a problem, Ankh. We're all wrong on a regular basis, but admitting it in public is one of the most adult things anyone can do. I admire you for that.
I wouldn't bring up issues with eBook formatting unless I'd deduced they were intrinsic to the structure of the work itself. Poetry is a key example, but it isn't the only one.
Until they're dealth with, basic formatting limitations will circumscribe the reach of eBooks, and will force readers who care to retain at least a partial investment in printed books. Just now, I was on the phone with the publisher of a magazine I co-edit. We do eBook versions of our printed books, and a monthly Kindle edition of our blogged articles, fiction and poetry, but the magazine itself only exists in web and printed editions. This is because of layout issues with mobi and ePub and we're not the only magazine to have encountered the problem.
I suspect this might have something to do with copyright protection and attempts to make reverse engineering impossible, but the end result is less control over design and typography than any self-respecting graphic design person finds tolerable. No eBook format should be
less flexible than the most basic letterpress. I once used a letterpress to lay out a chapbook to achieve an antique look, so I'm speaking literally, not making an analogy.
Here's what would be great: If Amazon, Sony and B&N all agreed to back a single extended format in addition to their proprietary ones. For many books in prose, ePub and mobi could suffice. But for more involved layouts, and fewer issues than pdfs create, there could exist this additional format, which would allow the ePublication of poetry, format-dependent magazines and structurally challenging books like Glas. It would also allow for the reproductino of unusual formatting within otherwise conventional novels (cf. alternating narrative strings at the end of Jim Thompson's
Hell of a Woman or the synesthetic typography at the end of Alfred Bester's
The Stars My Destination).