Quote:
Originally Posted by ahi
What makes you think that it's an either-or proposition? It seems a counter-intuitive assumption to me. And, to be frank, any time the publisher decides to save on getting typography or even just the hyphenation part right will not be time re-allotted to additional proofreading.
There is, I'm rather sure, no chance of improving the content accuracy of eBooks by arguing for relaxing the typographic standards thereof.
And as I've noted a good few times though, good quality typography is not difficult or time-consuming to do with the right tools and technologies, and even great typography is not prohibitively so, even for a small publisher.
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What I meant was that any benefits of improved typography over what can currently be acheived on a reflowed epub or similar pale into insignificance (N.B. to me, with my particular priorities) with respect to the improvement that would result if publishers improved their basic proof reading of ebooks (and, indeed, all books). The current standard on this area is so poor, that it doesn't really strike me as at all gainful to try and convince publishers to produce hand-crafted layouts for various sizes. I'd rather concentrate on encouraging them to improve the basic accuracy of the product.
Striving for perfect (for somebody's arbitrary definition of perfect) typography on a book which is riddled with errors is simply polishing the proverbial you-know-what.
For me (and I emphasise that this is for me - as I've said, different people want different things), if the content is accurate then I'm happy with a very basic layout - minor hyphenation errors or even stacks etc. don't really bother me.
Having said that, I take your point that a format which mixed a reflowable format with specialised layouts for specific sizes would be ideal. My concern is that I can't see how publishers who can't even get the basics right are going to do it well - I'd rather they just concentrated on the fundamentals.
/JB