Forgive the double-post, but I noticed JSWolf's post way after I submitted mine.
Quote:
Originally Posted by JSWolf
There are a lot of things publishers don't do correctly and this has nothing to do with how you like your eBooks to look. Just ask Hitch to tell you. I'm shure she will mostly agree here.
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You also have to keep in mind the economics behind it. Print still is where the money is at, and many of these companies have their complicated workflows set in stone. They are designing their books for PRINT FIRST (InDesign, Quark, DocBook, etc. etc.).
Luckily, those slow lumbering beasts in the publishing industry are probably going to start shifting more towards EBOOK FIRST mentality, as ebooks start to rise in popularity, and more people start to consume their books on the web/ereaders/tablets/smartphones. For now, it is still in that awkward growing phase.
Reminds me a lot of the discussion we had going on here in the "Automated Workflows" topic:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=232413
I also linked to these two fantastic articles (which I highly recommend everyone who is interested in this discussion should read):
"HTML5 is the Future of Book Authorship":
http://radar.oreilly.com/2013/09/htm...uthorship.html
"The Case for Authoring and Producing Books in (X)HTML5":
http://www.balisage.net/Proceedings/...einfeld01.html
You also have the old school typographers, thinking of measurements in inches, millimeters, fixed page sizes, fixed font sizes, etc. etc... and new school typographers coming in with web/reflowability in mind.
All the old school typographers had to care about was the SURFACE... what the finished product LOOKS like. It doesn't matter to them if the code in the backend is complete trash, in a physical book, all you see is the end result! If you are designing everything in InDesign using all of the WYSYWIG editing, you just see how it will look when it is printed! (I liken this to all the authors who use a word processor, and don't use the Styles functionality).
The same sort of change is occurring currently in your typical UI Design. Now, instead of designing your application/website for desktops first, then creating some bastard stepchild of your site (mobile).... things are shifting more towards designing one site that scales/reflows to look good on any size device, because mobile is becoming a much larger portion of internet browsing.
You still have A TON of the Internet that doesn't work well on mobile, but that will slowly shift.