Thread: paper books versus ebooks
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Old 02-20-2014, 12:26 PM   #150
Rev. Bob
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Quote:
Originally Posted by UnicornSalesman View Post
I love ebooks, but they should be so much better than they are at the moment. Their potential is limitless, but they're crippled by DRM, ereader limitations, etc.
That's certainly true. I've been thinking about writing a "please quit making these stupid mistakes" open letter to e-publishers just on the topic of how they handle things presently - existing technology that they're neglecting or misusing. Yes, DRM's on that list, but so are other things like "use relative units, not inches or points," "clean up your HTML code," and "specify complete metadata."

A personal pet peeve is when the publisher deliberately specifies a small text size as the book's standard. I've seen several books lately where, right there at the top of the governing stylesheet, they say (translated) "make the type 10% smaller than whatever's currently called for - just because." So if I've got my reader set to display text at 20 pixels tall, their book shows it at 18. There's no point to it, and I strip that out whenever I see it. Or, if they bury that sort of declaration deeper (like in paragraph styles), I'll insert such a line to compensate: "Oh, the standard paragraph is 80% of normal? No problem; I'll make the document start at 125%, and because 80% of 125 is 100, the text will look right."

Of course, small copyright-page text is a different matter, just like big text in headers and certain other size changes are. I'm just saying that the standard text size in a book should match the reader's preferences. Radical concept, eh?
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