Quote:
Originally Posted by dmikov
To mr Ahi and some others who bought into his rhetorics.
The question of the thread is not Typography vs. plain text.
Good typography is good. Why would anybody say no to a better looking book? If it came with no strings attached.
What many people on this thread are trying to say is when typography overrules the major attraction of portable/mobile universal format, that can be read on any device (from iPhone to 24" computer screen), then we don't want it with it's limitations.
And that's what a pdf is.
So please abandon the posturing of an elite connosier and all insinuations, that people don't know what they want from books. That's just ridiculous.
P.S There is no reason to invent straw man of death of bookmaking or abandoning decentrly formatted book. That's not what this thread is about and nobody but Ahi saying that. This thread is quite simple is about can an old aniquated pdf be a fit for a new media i.e e-book reading devices or not.
|
Sorry but I'm going to support Ahi's perspective more or less. I'm interested in the whole "reinvention of the book" idea with hardware and software solutions, and I agree with most that right now, PDFs are often really crappy in
practice, but the current popular formats aside from PDF are half-assed even in
theory. Hey, that's cool if you don't consider literature to be a visual art in addition to being the words themselves. If you want nothing more than a hardware edition of Microsoft Wordpad, more power to you. Many, many people aspire to higher standards of presentation and visual quality and readability apart from simply enlarging the font.
I'd be reasonably satisfied with the low-grade ePubs if their cost reflected their quality. I'd be much more satisfied with PDF if the publishers did their bloody jobs and made decent files in the first place. As far as I'm concerned, everything available today is pretty poor, and I guess reflects the state of the ebook reader technology (even though it's a minority of all digital book reading)
However, if designers and publishers took ebooks seriously enough, they would invest time and energy into them. That isn't happening yet.
There certainly can be places for flexible layouts, where presentation is generally unimportant. I wouldn't expect to read blogs in finely-crafted PDFs, but then again I also wouldn't pay to read blogs, unless they had some kind of real professional value. It's like paying to watch YouTube.
If I were more proactive and the cognitive scientists I know weren't too busy smoking marijuana and applying for grants for video game research and generally uninterested in books unless the pages roll well, I think it'd be fun to gather an independent think-tank to work towards a new reading paradigm that transcends the codex and the online web page; one that could be developed in conjunction with available technology. Patchwork solutions like "uh...let's just use css" are a bit unfortunate. Of course, I'm not more proactive, and the people I know who would be good to work with on something like this wouldn't want to do it without a healthy grant...