Quote:
Originally Posted by ahi
You're as funny as ever, Jon. 
A format that is incapable of professionally typesetting (a process that includes layout work, since professional typesetting is a bit of a dirty phrase around here) all (or at least the vast majority of) books is not a viable alternative to paper books.
Even reflow-enthusiasts rarely argue that reflow is viable for typographically complex books, and such books do make up a considerable percentage (if not downright the majority) of existent books.
eBooks today, with ePub and similar formats at least, are primarily novel readers... worse yet, primarily amateur fiction and romance novel readers.
Not everyone is willing to lay out hundreds of dollars for a computer whose associated commercial offerings cannot even match, never mind exceed, the quality of raggy $2.00 used paperbacks from the local used book store.
New functionality like variable font sizes, in-book links to facilitate sensible jumping about, et cetera are great... but they do not make the product viable if it fails to meet the bare minimum quality standards set by paper books for the last several centuries.
- Ahi |
Buh?
Ok, of the new york times best sellers, what is the percentage of "typographically complex" books? In terms of dollar values spent on books, what is the proportion of the sales of those "complex" books you speak of?
And now, to the real question, given that ePub is a HTML renderer, where did you get the idea that it could not be used for complex layouts?
One of the things you have to give up by moving to a reflowable, resizable system is point level control of where everything on your page goes. Of the books in my book shelves, the only ones hurt by this are the D&D manuals, and I believe I could redesign even those to look good.
The _advantages_ of a reflowable, resizable format though, are marked. For instance, how useful is the most beautifully typeset book in the world if the text is too small for you to read easily? At that point, it ceases being a "book" and is instead just an "artwork". It evokes emotions in you, like frustration, because some idiot thought they knew better than you what your needs were.
Anyway, I'll go back to reading my amateur fiction and romance novels now. I'm sure Dean Koontz, David Weber, Dan Brown and Terry Pratchett would love to know they've been labelled "amateur".