Quote:
Originally Posted by Elfwreck
S'okay; I don't need to see that one to know that some books have typography that isn't going to translate to reflowable formats. House of Leaves is never going to be an ebook (worth reading), either. There are things you can do on the printed page that just don't translate to screen. (The children's book industry is never going to transfer to pixels, not even if we start teaching in Kindergarten with an e-ink tablet per child.)
OTOH, screen tech can let us do things that the printed page doesn't allow. The most obvious is multimedia, followed by animated images; those have been co-opted by advertisers so strongly that people flinch from them without thinking how they could enhance books. But there are page-linking possibilities that are a hassle on paper--the "Choose Your Own Adventure" series would make excellent ebooks.
References that link to other books in your library are (theoretically) possible: download a "Critical Analysis of Shakespeare's Rhymes" book, and attached is a free Gutenberg copy of the sonnets and several plays, and the reader can bounce between them. (A print book could easily include all 150 sonnets, but not six or seven plays, without drastically increasing the price.)
Keyword bookmarking is possible, so you could click to show a list of all passages you've tagged as "political theory." Dictionary support and annotations are already common features. "Puzzle" books are possible, where clues in the text lead to clicking on certain words in certain orders, to get more clues, to eventually lead to a hidden prize.
There's so much that could be done with ebooks that it seems odd to focus on getting them to look more like printed books. (Especially considering the drop in typgraphic quality that's happened to print since word processors became common.)
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Ok... and again, I agree with a lot of things you say.
But I emphatically do not believe that the new possibilities either need to come at the detriment of what can already be done with paper books, or that those new possibilities are worth the quality-drop of such a discarding.
If professional typography is the price of moving pictures in books (or "books") then I will be returning to paper books... or, rather, more likely I will continue to typeset my own books and enjoy a reading experience qualitatively comparable to paper books.
But my patience is limited, and the day will come when I decide to never again pay a single cent for an eBook that is more poorly formatted than the paper book equivalent.
- Ahi