Quote:
Originally Posted by b0ned0me
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.
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Beautiful books are becoming increasing quick and simple to create. The same amount of time it takes to hack together an ePub, I can use the same source file and create a far more professional looking PDF via LaTeX. Add a few more hours, and I can generate an equally good looking PDF for all the popular eBook screen sizes, with two or three font-sizes for each, to accommodate people's font size preferences.
There is no real world reason that necessitates reflow formats, or even has them make sense with all things considered. If PDFs could include multiple PDF files, from which the user could pick which to view, font-size adjustment with perfect typography would be a reality today. And, unlike ePub viewers getting typography and hyphenation right, changing the PDF format and its viewers thusly is a software improvement that is actually possible.
Oh... and where you say "usual mediocre-quality physical book" leaves me confused. Are you not aware that 99.9% of physical books are, typographically, far higher quality than reflow formats can possibly achieve?
- Ahi