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Old 08-29-2009, 11:04 PM   #301
Elfwreck
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Posts: 5,187
Karma: 25133758
Join Date: Nov 2008
Location: SF Bay Area, California, USA
Device: Pocketbook Touch HD3 (Past: Kobo Mini, PEZ, PRS-505, Clié)
Quote:
Originally Posted by LDBoblo View Post
Book A) A bit bigger than the rest, classic cloth hardcover with stitch binding, good quality and design, $30
Book B) Almost same size as Book A, but perfect-bound (glue bound) trade paperback, good paper and design, $20
Book C) Mass market paperback, passable paper and OK printing, but not particularly good. Fairly compact, $10
Book D) Somehow-legal txt file printed with an inkjet in a big font on low-grade recycled paper, in a cheap D-ring binder, A4 sized $2
Book E) Another mass-market-sized paperback but from a different publisher with much better paper, cover art, and typography than Book C. $18

Which one would you buy? No shuffling like "depends on what kind of book..." allowed.
If I'm financially flush, book C is my first choice. I like the small size & portability of mmpbs; I've always preferred them to hardcover or trade paperbacks. When I've got less money to spare, I'll take D; it's several steps up from the dot-matrix printed books I used to sometimes read. (Does it have to be in a big font? Why wasn't it laid out in two or three columns like a newsletter? That's what I do when I'm printing ebooks.)

I appreciate good layouts in books, but I'm fairly oblivious to the finer points of typography. (And I say that as someone who's chatted with people who design fonts for a living; I appreciate the elegance and complexity involved, but the nuances are wasted on me. I have preferences, but a book's layout has to be truly hideous before I'll stop reading.) Portability is my top concern; I read fast, and nearly constantly when I can, and I want the next book at my fingertips when I finish this one. The only books I want in hardcover or durable bindings are reference books, generally RPG manuals.

I won't say that my interests are best, or that the industry should revolve around them... but the industry should take them into consideration, because I won't pay extra for good typesetting; I'd rather buy text files that I have to format myself.

I don't expect the industry to settle on one format of ebook any more than we've settled on one size of computer screen, or one type of car, or one material for cooking pots. Different needs, different interests, different media.

My ebook reading preferences are:
1) PDF I've made myself: 3.46x4.6" pages, .1" margins, 9pt Fontin condensed .1 pts 3pt between paragraphs 1st line indented .3" main text, 12 pt centered chapter headers, title page formatted to my artistic whims of the moment, PDF with chapters bookmarked and tags;

2) PDF I've made myself to share with other people: font change to Georgia, proabably 10 or 11-pt main text size;

3) ePub
4) RTF 15 or 16 pt basic font size,
5) Calibre-made LRF (which goes here, but in practicality doesn't exist; I don't convert to LRF, and Sony's LRX's are all made with a larger font than I'm comfortable reading)
6) Commercial "paperback sized" PDF, cropped to remove headers/footers, possibly with bookmarks added, with tags & metadata added,
7) Txt
8) Commercial "paper back sized" PDF, locked to prevent editing. (This'd be ADE PDFs, which I don't have any of? Or PDFs I pick up somewhere that I don't have access to my unlock software.)
9) Letter-sized PDFs.

I don't know which of those PDF versions is supposed to make me give up my ePub preference. I do know that there is NO hint from publishers that they're considering making PDFs sized for e-Ink readers, of any size.
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