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Originally Posted by ahi
So humanity will discard the vast bulk of the centuries old art of typography and bookmaking in the transition to electronic books (arts which are, by the way, totally and completely about making reading a more pleasant experience), for the sake of people being able to change font-sizes arbitrarily and for the sake of publishers not having to make multiple files for different sized devices?
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Quote:
Originally Posted by sminarovich
I mere dabbler but still...handmade papers, leather, sewen binds truly should still be considered true art.
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Beautiful books ARE works of art, but craftsmanship is scary expensive. Once upon a time all books were hand-written and hand-illustrated on hand-scraped vellum. A skilled craftsman might produce one copy of a book every few years, and if you were reasonably wealthy you might be able to own as many as a dozen books. Pretty much every change since then has been to make books less artistic, less attractive, easier to produce and easier to own. Likewise for shoes, underwear, furniture and pretty much everything else that people like to have. If ebook software and hardware cuts the odd corner here and there with pagination and justification to let me get several thousand works by several hundred authors into my briefcase for a reasonable amount of money, I'm just fine with that. Spellchecking and editing is a lot more important IMO, but then that's going downhill for real books anyway.
At the end of the day, given the choice I'd rather read a poorly formatted e-book by Jim Butcher, CJ Cherry or Jules Verne than the most beautifully crafted hardback by Clive Cussler or Dan Brown (in fact, I'd pay a substantial premium!).
Given a choice between the usual mediocre-quality physcial book and an ebook, I'm starting to lean more and more towards ebooks providing they have some amount of longevity and future-proofing. So for me, standardising on ePub seems a good idea - I'm far more bothered by lack of book availability than minor visual shortcomings.