Quote:
Originally Posted by Katsunami
Could it be that Wizards of the Coast attracts many (mainly) nerdy/technical people that are bound to know a lot about e-reading, have probably read a lot of their paper novels in the past, and therefore take care to make their books look good?
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It's actually not very time-consuing to make a good-looking ebook if you know what you're doing, and care enough about the result to put in that time. There are people on the forum who could do it in their sleep. The problem is that many (most?) publishers treat epubs as music files: as long as it's an mp3 (epub), it'll have the same content, it's good enough, right? Cheap wins the day. Subcontractors (or the resident geek) who actually does the conversion might not be very good at it, and the results are as you observe in many commercial epubs. WotC either got lucky, or cares enough about digital versions to do a similar amount of QC to what they do with their paper releases. I suspect the latter (where would you expect to find a higher percentage of nerds than amongst people working for WotC, after all?), and more publishers should follow their example.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Katsunami
- DROP THE FRACKING BUILT-IN FONT. (Often "Charis".) Why do publishers do that?
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There are a few reasons to embed fonts:
* The designers want the look of a particular font for presentation reasons.
* Your text might include special glyphs that are not present in standard fonts (I work in academia, and many researcher's names have strange letters in them).
* The most common reason is probably that the sweatshop/resident geek doing it haven't really given it it any thought, and left that option enabled in Indesign or whatever tool they're using.
The first reason can have merit in a few special cases. A classic might have a better presentation with an old-looking font, see "Three Men and a Dog" in the download section here for an example.
The second is strictly necessary in a few cases, but the third... well, I'll let you guess what I think about that
Quote:
Originally Posted by Katsunami
- Drop the half-line spacing between paragraphs in many books.
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That, along with justification and line height, is a decision based on taste more than anything. There are really no "right" choices, mostly what designers prefer. As a reader I prefer indens, no spacing, and that is by far the most common in our area of publishing.
On a side note it also has a significant effect on readability, which might be a consideration for some categories of books. We published a book about reading disabilities (paper edition), and the authors (experts in the area) had some very stringent requirements: The text should have a larger line height, shorter line length (larger font size was what we chose), "ragged right", spacing between paragraphs, and a sans-serif font. This would make it easier to read for people with reading disabilities, who were among the target audience. I learnt a lot about readability working with those guys, but I must admit that the result looked horrible to me