Quote:
Originally Posted by Liudprand
Yes, I agree with that. But I also think one of the reasons is that the tools for producing ebooks are not yet user-friendly enough for people to casually play around with different style/formatting options in a way that would allow the industry practice to evolve more rapidly.
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Really?
Decent free tools are well over 10 years old and much easier to use and better output than Indesign for ebooks, Indesign is a nearly 40 year old concept. Lack of competence and training in the publishing companies is the problem.
It's actually easier than producing a complex paper publication if you know what you are doing.
Sadly @Hitch and I still see Word docs produced as if it's a glass typewriter or Wordstar in 1978 on CP/M. You can't know the horror of it if it's only seen on paper, though paper book publishing is not as high quality as 100 years ago when there were no tools except Linotype (c.1890s) and competitors (c.1914).
The Victorian typewriter only resulted in legible MSS and soon carbon copies and stencils (Gestetner & mimeograph).
Early CRT editors were actually based on teletype systems (see edlin) and then wordprocessing came later to PCs with direct formatting on CP/M and DOS, but had been on minicomputers and dedicated machines earlier. Wordprocessing with Outlining and Styles is over 20 years old, but many people just use the default settings and click on direct formatting as if it's just a graphical version of the late 1960s minicomputer text editors.