Quote:
Originally Posted by meeera
Not everyone, no. There's no way I'd be able to read a print copy of The Deathly Hallows with my disabilities now. And plenty of other people with arthritis, visual impairment, chronic pain, muscle weakness, etc also wouldn't be able to, or would struggle mightily.
This conversation has many facets. Some are about the artiste's aesthetic vision. Some are about user-centric vs maker-centric design. Some are about accessibility for people with disabilities (again, as I said, a huge and growing market for ebooks). And so on.
For you, this all just seems to be a rant about how people these days are all spoiled-brat Gumbies who don't know what's good for them. I just don't find that a particularly edifying or productive conversation.
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Fortuitously for all of us, the entire
point of threads on this forum is for various people's opinions, whether we all agree with them or not. My viewpoint is not any less valid than that of any
other reader, no matter who agrees with them. My views on this are certainly partly formed by the fact that I live in this world, on the publisher and production side, full-time, but frankly are more strongly formed by the nonsense I see with the endless gumby-ing of manuscripts. Apparently, however, you missed my point in which I supported the idea of resizable fonts, etc., or are choosing to ignore it. If you think I'm unsympathetic about having disabilities and using readers, you are quite, quite wrong.
I don't particularly like the idea that I have to peruse (not skim) every single book I want to try on Amazon because the "you can fix it if it sucks" mindset has taken root, which is indelibly tied to the "if it's digital, you can change it" mindset, and is definitely an offshoot of the "fix the book to be the way you want" idea. Or the endless discussions on forums where I see authors saying "well, I can't afford to hire an editor now,
so I just slapped it up there, and
after I've sold enough, I'll pay for an editor to fix it and I'll republish it then." Who is served by that? Not I as a reader. Nor you, whether you can better hold HP&TDH on a Nook or in print. That part is not relevant to the "fix it how you want it" aspect.
Now, maybe that's just me being cranky; but in my old and jaded opinion, books should be bloody finished BEFORE the publisher--traditional, self- or whatever--pushes "save and publish." I don't believe that you can extricate the one from the other. People have become accustomed to a number of things, in very few years; that all documents are subject to change, with a click; that books can be "changed" at will; that publishers should hop to and fix typos whenever someone reports one to Amazon; that margins, indents, paragraph styles, fonts, et al, are fungible...and that nowadays, an author doesn't have to bother to finish editing or polishing the book before publishing it, expecting you to expend your hard-earned money for it just as you would a title from Baen or Ace or RH.
I don't see them as separate things. I never said, as I iterated in this thread, that we make books like PDF's, nor did I say that they should be, although if PDF's had arisen to ascension, this discussion wouldn't be happening at all, and PDF's would be just as light for someone to read with an ereader. We wouldn't be discussing fonts, indents, margins...none of that. And even then, people would still be able to enlarge the font, albeit not as smoothly as they can now with ePUB. If the PDF's were created like POD PDF's are created now, nobody would be expecting publishers to stand at attention to fix typos, either.
Just making the observation. If people get ruffled feathers because I say that as readers, we've become spoiled, that's unfortunate, but as I said some 5 or 10 or 500 posts previously, that's a double-edged sword, because now we also have to live with all the unintended consequences of that instant gratification, which is completely crappy and incomplete works being published, for which we are asked and expected to pay. I find that an irksome climate in which to try to find books to read. It rather boggles my mind, to be blunt.
Lastly: I also hold, when forced, that the publisher has the "final say" in the layout of his or her book, just as s/he chose the words to use. When push comes to shove, I appreciate that the reader may like a different font. Hell, I often do myself. BUT: we get a lot of clients to whom the layout is important. They go to great lengths to pick a fleuron, or a font, or whatever. It matters to them. I'd love to think that both "sides" could be accommodated, but if I have to choose...I'd have to go with the entity paying for the book to be created in the first place. Yes, sure, readers buy it; but just like anything else, the person who pays the freight gets to choose. Using HP as merely one example, maybe a lot of people thought that those little chapter heading drawings in the digital versions were crap. Maybe they thought that they should 'go,' and not waste space. But from where I sit, she's entitled to have them in there, because she created that world. {shrug}. In a world in which everyone has 50 channels of TV tailored to them, content on the web tailored to them, News readers tailoring news bits to them...I don't see this as easily solvable. People have indeed become very accustomed to suiting themselves; a bespoke world. In as many ways as there are people.
Hitch