Quote:
Originally Posted by Denwayz
Thanks to all for your input.
Typography is an art. The letters themselves are elements of poetry. White/Black space (and the spectrum) is the ground of their emergence. Epub -- for reasons described above -- cannot presence this. That is not a bad thing -- this is a different medium. One never imagines that in transforming a book into a movie one is going to put a whole lot of text on the screen.
That said, I would draw your attention to a factor that strikes me as troubling. Great books are often transgressive. The works of Galileo, Abelard, Teilhard, and then Ulysses, Lady Chatterly's Lover, Lolita -- these all struggled to find the light of day, and would not have done so except for the insistence of writers and the courage of publishers prepared to break the structures of what was taken as 'acceptable'. Now, with the various epub protocols, we are faced with new kinds of Procrustean beds. It would be a great pity and loss if epub constraints prevented some great work of our time from reaching us. Just saying.
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??? Why would it? There are myriad different ways for "art" to reach us, in this day and age. We all know that not every book is able to be digitized; for some the available digitization methods don't do the book justice. A compromise is used, specifically to ensure that the great work of art reaches that audience that wants it. And with all due respect, the works you mention, once we're talking the age of typography--Ulysses, Lady Chatterley's Lover, Lolita--had no impediment, certainly,
due to typography.
In today's world it's simplicity itself to create and distribute a book, complete with its desired typography, in print, in pdf, in eBook format, or even on the web. There's nothing that will preclude some tortured, brilliant artist from ensuring that his work sees the light of day.
My shop has done 3700+ eBooks. (yeah, that number boggles my brain, too.) I've given up arguing with people that accessibility is more important than (most) typography. What happens is a given author insists that the layout and typography (typically, font-switching and size-switching) are too important to the story to be sacrificed...and because of that (and because of what MOBI does with line-heights), we end up with the client insisting that the book be done in fixed-layout--which we do. So, now the book is reader-unfriendly, and onerous to read, but, bygod,
the typography is preserved! Hallelujah, praise Jesus and pass the ammo.
There's a guy you should connect with, who's been posting on this forum, trying to bring his thousand-plus pages of book to the digital realm--but what he has, cannot be done in a reflowable layout. It could be done in fixed-layout, which I told him--but I aso told him what I just said here; that fixed-layout that requires/forces the reader to tap-zoom, pinch-zoom, pan-scan, read, pan-scan, read, page-slide, pan-scan, read, is to me, an abomination, and will result in readers that will be bloody unhappy. From a commercial standpoint, even blithely ignoring the much-put-upon-reader, those same unhappy folks will complain to Amazon--and that's a horse of a different color. Amazon will quickly deploy a KQN (Kindle Quality Notice), and put a warning on the book, on the sales page, advising all that the book has quality issues. I know from some of our clients that have received those (for as few as THREE typos, mind you), that sales will fall off a cliff, the moment said notice appears.
ANYway, yon author feels that his typography is also crucial.
Back on Topic:
NOW, it seems to me that this entire discussion, THIS thread, was about a fleuron, was it not?
Is there some reason that the image method is wholly unacceptable?
Hitch