Quote:
Originally Posted by DiapDealer
My question is: why has ereading turned so many readers into armchair typography (and book formatting) experts?  |
Because people either want their e-reader to look EXACTLY like a book and complain if it doesn't, or they want it to NOT look like a book and complain if it does.
I'm somewhere in the middle.
I don't need a one inch margin around the text on an e-reader. 5px is more than enough.
I don't mind if the chapter starts at the top, or in the middle of the screen.
I do want my text justified, no white lines between paragraphs, and a normal indent.
I would like ligatures... but they are not really required. (I've had many books with and without them.)
Quote:
Originally Posted by DiapDealer
Well I get that.
I just find it ironic that we (the typography "experts") complain more about formatting that is infinitely easier to "fix" than we ever complained about formatting we simply had no chance in hell of "fixing."
I'm also amused by the increasingly popular notion that there was ever some sort of magical, mythical pbook formatting/typography standard that ebooks aren't somehow adhering to. I can pull hundreds of pbooks off my shelves that break the typography "rules" laid down by the books on either side of them. And yet, it's only ebooks that are criticized for their typographic/formatting inconsistency.
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This is because ebooks are now fixable. Everybody understood that a book is something you buy and it is what it is... but as soon as it is something digital, everybody understands that it's possible to tamper with it. Therefore everybody wants to have it changed to their preference.
Also, as pwalker8 says, it's the nature of man. Have you ever played Caesar or SimCity or any other building game? In the beginning, people don't really complain, except about the really big stuff. It goes like this:
- "We have no houses!" (give them houses)
- "We have no food and water!" (give them food and water)
- "We have no...!" (give them....)
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- "Why do I have to walk 2 minutes to the nearest grocery store?!"
...
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- "Why do we only have 4 types of wine to drink?!"
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- "I want my perfume in a heart-shaped crystal bottle with a pink porcelain stopper!"
The same is going on with e-books: complaints are being raised about smaller and smaller problems.