Quote:
Originally Posted by Katsunami
Nonsense. It's perfectly possible to create a perfect and good looking book as an EPUB, but it just isn't done right. Having the TOC work correctly and be complete, having nice high-res covers and maps and some good looking chapter headings and section breaks goes a long way to make an e-book a good product.
Paying money for one and then discovering it's no better than crappy pirated and OCR-ed works of 10 years ago is just disappointing. There is no reason for that anymore; not since we have EPUB (and AZW3).
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I wasn't very clear. It's not that it can't be done it's that the economics don't work to allow rough edges to be cleaned up prior to incorporating enhancements. (Of course there's the terminology problem too-isn't cleaning up the 'rough edges' an enhancement? But I've never seen that sort of enhancement being economically justified.) Yes, it ticks me off too-but IMO that's life.
I'm not familiar with TeX/LaTeX. From your complaint about poor formatting it appears that it either doesn't work well or isn't widely used. I'm assuming it isn't widely used. Why not? If I were a publisher & had an automated (and inexpensive) way to 're-typeset' books when I published them in a different format then I'd certainly use it.
BTW I understand about the ePub problem. It's part of the greater HTML problem. HTML was designed to deliver information, not formatting. It's been badly corrupted by marketers but it's still, at heart, an information delivery language. That doesn't have anything to do with poor quality graphics though-I'm not sure what causes that except a publisher that just doesn't care. Or could it be copyright issues? I have heard that many ebooks are published without covers because the rights to the artwork are separate from the rights to the story.
I assume the TOC issue would be solved by using the TeX/LaTeX system you mentioned. Again, why isn't it more widely used? That's a mystery to me. Is it possible that few publishers know about it? I didn't but then I'm not a publisher.