Quote:
Originally Posted by barryem
I'm 75 and I've been reading novels since I was 4, so 71 years. I've been reading ebooks for about 25 or 30 years along with paper books and now for the last 6 or 7 years, just ebooks.
During that entire time the concept of a standard way for books to look just never occurred to me, probably because they all had their own unique look and style. Now that you have me thinking about it I'm glad that's how it is. Please, please, please don't make books all look the same.
Frankly I don't care that much. What a book looks like, the style of it's printing and formatting, has little impact on the story in most cases. Or, if it does, I'm not aware of it. There have been a few exceptions such as books by Alfred Bester where the layout of the text was almost pictoral in places. Usually though, a book has it's own font and spacing and margins and that's just fine with me.
Barry
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I think I wasn't clear when I referenced the "standards." Again, I'm not suggesting that all e-books look the same. That probably wouldn't affect the readability of the book, but that would be like every web page you visit on the net looking like every other one. Booorrrriinngg!
What I'm advocating is a standard for the way the programming is presented, so that when the developer comes up with a cool presentation technique, it shows the same on Aldiko, Cool Reader, Moon+, and any other app you use; and the same on the dedicated e-readers.
I have to say, one of the most brilliantly formatted e-books I've seen is, not surprisingly,
the user manual for Sigil. Dave Heiland has used some clever layout techniques, use of embedded fonts, and various other devices which, while not improving (or degrading) readability, gives an
interesting-looking page to enjoy
while you're reading.
So maybe instead of saying a uniform presentation, maybe I should have talked about a uniform interpretation of the unique coding within the e-books.