Quote:
Originally Posted by EowynCarter
Fact is, we can tell the diffrence, up to a certain point. ePub, when PROPERLY used, already allows for nice to read book. (I'm speaking there of book containing mainly text). You're blaming on ePub what's the publisher's fault.
E-reader are not paper book. So does the typos rules needs to be as strict, or even the same ? Maybe not.
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If you are asking, EowynCarter, whether the rules of typography apply to eBooks the same way, the answer is no. I'm not sure I would put it in terms of "as strict" though, as some of the difference are due more to the size of the available reading area than anything else.
Some obvious stuff:
No need for blank pages in eBooks. In paper books they are mostly used as separators, and, more often than not, occur only on one page of the two seen at any given time.
No need for half title pages (the first page of most paper books is a title page with only the author and the title, followed by a more full title page with publisher and possibly other information)--unnecessary repetition that is annoying and nothing else due to inability to skip it as quickly as one can with a paper book.
Widows and orphans are very difficult to avoid with a small viewing area and a (more or less) regular size font. There simply are not enough characters to creatively shift and juggle in order to adjust where pages begin and end. However not all widows and orphans are created equal... a single word spilling over to the next page is worse than an almost full line spilling over to the next page... and there's probably nothing worse than the signature line of a quoted letter being separated from the text of the letter by a page-break.
Of course, this latter item will cease to be an issue once eBook reader's standardize on a screen-size of between 8" - 10", and they will... if they are not forever to remain pulp-fiction and public domain fiction reading devices.
The other reason I would avoid suggesting, EowynCarter, that less strict rules for eBooks are necessary or even reasonably is the fact that decently typesetting an eBook takes less time than any other part of the publishing processing (seeing as how they already did the typesetting once, possibly for a page size not too much bigger than the screen-size of the targeted eBook reader) and the benefits are limited only by the number of copies purchased or distributed.
Publishers spend thousands of dollars on preparing and marketing even some fairly shitty books that, in retrospect, one wonders why they ever expected to be able to sell. Why assume they couldn't (if they cared to) pay another $100 - $200 to a LaTeX jockey to rejig their book to the prevalent eBook reading device screen sizes? (Down the road PDFs multiple sizes and multiple fonts could be contained in a single file.) Surely this neither takes longer nor costs more than it does for them to do the monkeying around to make an ePub.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Kostas
Hey, I'm deeply aware of my ignorance.
I don't want to build my house. Experts will do it. But I want to choose the color of the walls if you don't mind.
I don't want to bake my bread but I prefer french ficelle, even if a bunch of experts have established that baguette is better.
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And I don't want to have to reconvert pdfs to another format because they look awfull on my 6" screen, I prefer to have experts do this job for me.
So simple...
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I dub you the King of very excellent analogies.
- Ahi