Quote:
Originally Posted by ahi
Elfwreck... to me nothing sounds more incredulous than your implied suggestion that bookmaking will, relatively speaking, go down the crapper for good with the wide adoption of eBooks.
Nothing that you (and obviously many others) seem to find so unlikely feels as incredibly unrealistic--in fact downright surreal--to me as that.
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Prediction:
I think that human format editing will be lessened as much as possible, the way that proofreading has been largely turned over to word processing programs. I think it'll still exist for special editions and art books, but mainstream paperbacks will have their content thrown into a program, get a few minutes of scrollthrough with touch-up for anything that looks really awful, and then printed & output to whatever ebook formats they're going to produce.
The programs will do a better job than 90% of individuals can (which is not saying much on its own), and will have algorithms that look for rivers and orphans and can hyphenate a couple-hundred words, so editors can point the the program results vs raw documents in basic WP programs, and say "see, it's better!" And they will insist this frees them from the need to hire a person to carefully do layout for every book.
Some publishers will continue to have human-proofed, human-formatted books. They will be sneered at for being old-fashioned elitists. Some will profit; some will collapse, and this will be taken by mainstream publisher as proof that those methods are no longer cost-effective.
The general public will continue to claim to notice no important differences between a PDF made from a Word document with default settings and a carefully-formatted paperback-sized ebook PDF. They will claim to prefer the letter-sized ones, "because I can print that," even though they won't print either. They will also be baffled at the idea of text-based PDF vs image-based PDFs. To them, both have words on the screen; what's the difference?
The science of typography won't change, but its place in the commercial marketplace of books will. And the general public will continue to be unaware that typography exists, or matters to them.