Quote:
Originally Posted by Hitch
Just the whole..."every ebook has to be endlessly fungible to satisfy every type of reading and formatting appetite, and, oh, yeah, let's get all the typos fixed while we're at it, too" mindset. That's all.
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Yes, the majority of ebook formats should be as fungible as possible. (Obviously, this is not "endless". There are limits. See below.) Lots and lots of us are reading ebooks mostly or partly
because of the flexibility in layout and display. When people who think they know our eyes/brain function and aesthetic preferences better than we do elect to do a whole lot of unnecessary hard-coding, it's irritating and can be frankly disrespectful to the customer. The beauty of the e-format is its flexibility. Why impose artificial restrictions on that? Use it to advantage! That's what good design - real, capital-D Design - is about.
It reminds me of the early days of the Web, when people kept presenting fixed-width and fixed-layout pages, basically online brochures rather than real websites. Even to the point that some would present text as images of text, because that's "exactly how they wanted it to look". These sorts of formats (which are still around, though decreasingly so thank goodness!) break in all sorts of situations that the web "designers" refused to anticipate: smaller browser windows, enlarged text for people with visual impairment, text-to-speech for blind folks, mobile devices, and so on.
Ebook designers need to learn the lessons of web design, not their pre-loaded lessons of print design. They're different animals. I think a fair few ebook producers (and I have no idea whether you're counted among them; I haven't seen your ebooks) are still in the mindset that ebooks are for presenting fixed-layout print-like pages on a screen. Those people are, on the whole, wrong. About the only time this sort of imposition of layout is reasonable and appropriate design, that I can think of right now, is a children's picture book, some graphic novels, or perhaps a few textbooks. It's gotten to the point where I now run every book through a Calibre conversion before reading, because so many of them force their own design choices on me, choices that don't work for me. Ugh.