Quote:
Originally Posted by ahi
Beautiful books are becoming increasing quick and simple to create.
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Really? How long would it take you to knock together something like this?
http://frmarkdwhite.files.wordpress....ated-bible.jpg
Personally I don't think getting the kerning, hyphenation, referencing and layout of graphic elements right in a textbook or whatever makes it 'beautiful'. It makes it professional and non-offensive, and it seems to be a step too far for a lot of publishers these days. How many books nowadays are hand-optimised page by page? Most of them look like they were dumped straight out of a word-processor or DTP package into the printer.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ahi
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
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Well, I've read a lot of books and I think I can say with my hand on my heart that I've
never been reading a book and thought "wow! This typography sure is nice". On the other hand, I've had plenty of moments of annoyance due to poor quality. Physical books nowadays sometimes include such delights as homonyms, typos(!), incorrectly referenced comments, charts/illustrations in the wrong place, and I've even seen entire paragraphs of text repeated or in the wrong place. You obviously take pride in your work and are employed by an organisation that is prepared to invest in order to produce a professional level of quality (you lucky dog!). However many of the books I've bought recently were printed on poor quality paper, with smudgy ink and flimsy spines, and some were clearly released without the benefit of a spell-check, let alone decent proof-reading/editing. If I'm going to have to put up with that, I may as well save some cubic metres of storage space and have it in e-form.
Given that people can't afford (or be bothered) to make the most of a well-established format like printed paper, it seems reasonable to assume that they won't make full use of the capabilities of e-formats. If editing and proof-reading is sometimes too much trouble these days, its likely that painstaking text layout is going to be even further down the priority list.
I'm sure PDF is a better layout for presenting publications than most alternatives, but if 99% of e-books are only using a tiny subset of the capabilities of any format, who cares? The limitation is more likely to be the ability of the person producing the book, or whether the various hardware and software readers can render it adequately (or even consistently) than the format itself. That, and the economics of selling enough copies to justify the effort are IMO the real challenges at the moment, not the further reaches of the 'format features' checklist.
Given the choice between an all-ePub mass market tomorrow or a continuation of the current format war in a teacup, I'd prefer the former. I honestly don't care whether the world settles on ePub, PDF, MOBI or whatever, so long as it gets us away from the constant fretting about incompatability and technical glitches as soon as possible. Then we might actually get the publishers paying some real attention to getting more ebooks out there, and maybe even to the quality and pricing of what they produce.