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Originally Posted by fbrzvnrnd
so: what is the best way to make an ebook of "1982, Janine"? 1) don't do it: it is an *analogic* creation. You can make a fixed layout, but where is the glory? It is only a digitized photocopy. The original is better. 2) re-create "1982, Janine". Understand the philosophy of the novel and build *another* digital work, a new "1982, Janine" that uses the digital tools as native.
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I think you're right. It would certainly be better to re-imagine the spirit of the book in the digital medium than just pour the words it into a standard jelly mould, which is what they appear to have done. But re-imagining it would be a big task requiring a lot of interest and dedication. It couldn't be an off-the-shelf production.
At present the ebook format doesn't appear to be good enough to do that, so you'd have to consider doing it in some form that supported this adventurous typography. Otherwise, as you say, just better not to even pretend that it's just a book that can be slung out there in a standard Kindle product.
Unfortunately, many books are indeed just digitised books and not digital books. For the bog-standard text on a page, it doesn't matter much. Even though the experience of reading on a Kindle is not the same as reading in a print book, they are analogous experiences for many books. That said, I appreciate typography, and the fact that many Kindle books are for instance set justified instead of ragged right even though there is no hyphenation results in bad-looking books. The lack of ligatures also. The average reader may not care about the 'f' colliding with the dot of the 'i', and the huge rivers of ugly space running through the page due to unhyphenated justification, but some do. And I am certainly not in favour of automatic hyphenation either, it can only be done attractively on a case-by-case basis, meaning only a fixed layout can support proper typography if you're going to insist on justification of text.
So an ebook really is quite limited. At present, the limitations seem to outweigh the advantages, and I wouldn't rush to produce an ebook of a book of mine that was still available cheaply enough in print. But if you just want to be entertained by words then an ebook will suffice. Even in badly produced print books the 'look' of the book tends to fade from sight if it is something one really wants to read. Still, I'd like to have both, aesthetic quality in presentation and ideas. So for me ebooks serve if I have nothing else, and I don't expect them to be much more than words that hopefully have at least been proofread a few times, and even that is expecting too much sometimes.