Quote:
Originally Posted by Superlucky
I've heard it repeatedly asserted that it's missing from ebooks, and I (and many other people) haven't noticed, so this statement is patently false. I think people who create p-books would love for it to be true, but it just isn't. I agree with Nate. It's great when a book (p or e) looks good, but if it doesn't I don't care.
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I agree. I
don't want a cover image. I want a title page like a 6th grade book report, title up top in large letters, author's name in the bottom right in smaller letters.
That's it! The feedbook branding annoys me, particularly because it's a color to gray-scale transition. I don't care about a synopsis or author biography, that's what Wikipedia is for.
Inside the book, I don't want pictures unless they're presenting factual information. In a fiction book, the best picture is the one you draw in your head. Bill Watterson, of Calvin & Hobbes fame, never told his readers what the "wet noodle incident" was. This was an event Calvin's parents would reference when Calvin was really acting up, and would scare him. Bill never explained the incident, because it could never be as good as what the individual reader had imagined for themselves.
For a textbook, sure pictures are important. Ditto for a biography. But for a cheap fiction story? It actually detracts from the reading experience for me to deal with poorly rendered images of someone else's thoughts. I HATE the Harry Potter art because it doesn't jive with my conception of how Harry should look.
I don't want fancy chapter titles, or curlicue first letters of a sentence. That's annoying. It throws the rest of the page off, and often makes it hard to locate where the next line begins because of the stupidly exaggerated letters. Oh sure, "if done well" will be a caveat, but why even add the complexity and annoyance? Books are about transferring thoughts in written form, not to look pretty.
Part of the reason I enjoy ebooks so much is because it removes all of that excessive garbage so often found in pbooks. If only most of them weren't OCR'd...