Quote:
Originally Posted by Katsunami
To create an e-book, you don't need to be a programmer. You only need to understand a bit of HTML and CSS. Now that Sigil (EPUB editor) is maturing, creating an EPUB, and thus an e-book is becoming ridiculously easy; it's no more difficult than creating a Word document.
The fact that e-books look like crap isn't because EPUB has to be redesigned or be reprogrammed or enhanced; it's because (some) publishers are (still) treating e-books as second rank products, and are not using the capabilities of the standard to its fullest.
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I'm not a fan of publishers but I believe they (or most of them anyway) are more interested in making money than books. That's why I think it's an economic issue. I don't think (most) publishers are interested in making books (regular or ebooks) look either good or bad-I think they're interested in making them look whatever way will make them the most money.
As it happens I disagree with your contention that you don't need to be a programmer. But then I disagree with most programmers about who is a programmer, too so perhaps it's our definitions of 'programmer' that differs. If you work with the raw HTML & CSS then, IMO, you're a programmer. If, OTOH, you use Sigil to produce HTML-encoded documents (ebooks) then you might not be a programmer. (Programmers can use tools like Sigil too.)
I haven't used Sigil. I understand it's free-so if it works why aren't publishers using it? Perhaps its training costs. As I said before I doubt if most publishers have any interest in producing books that look bad so the question is why they're doing it. IMO it's got to come down to money. Either the books need to be fixed manually, which is expensive, or tools that work aren't available, or the available tools that work require training to use-and that's also expensive. I'm not in the industry so I don't know which it is-it might even be that you're right & the poor quality is due to publishers' dislike of ebooks. I don't really believe that but I've been wrong once or twice before.