Quote:
Originally Posted by rogue_ronin
I'm not surprised that you can't perceive the value, but I am surprised that you find it annoying. I think you're probably an outlier.
Your low standards are easy to achieve. If it were the common standard, those of us with a greater need for aesthetics would suffer.
Subtracting information that you don't want from a well-designed and edited ebook is easy enough. Adding the information is hard, but worth doing. Destruction is always easier than creation.
Paying publishers for the terrible formatting that would satisfy you is ridiculous. It becomes paying people for a license to access, which is an aristocratic permission-culture ideal.
Add value and beauty and you are worth paying. And, frankly, admiring.
The real value is in pursuit of excellence and beauty itself. We must not live to the minimal values of the accountant when we embrace our culture.
m a r
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Ah, but that is where people differ. I'm sure I'm not the only one, although I may be a standard deviation or two out, that does not believe it is worth paying for some of these formatting issues.
Subtracting information out? That involves me putting effort into the item, which in turn lowers the price I am willing to pay for it, because time is money. If it doesn't have the features you want, don't buy it. If it has too many crappy features that I don't want, I won't buy it either. There will be a common ground reached, although not as fast as many would wish.
It's not necessarily terrible formatting to omit images, and I'm not sure why you believe so. Hell, I didn't even know what "kerning" was until I read this forum, even after reading a few novels on a Sony eReader. It obviously didn't affect my enjoyment of the story. And the story is the most important part of a book, which many seem to forget.
As far as that accountant crack and "culture"? It kind of goes back to that old joke about a cup. Is the cup half full or half empty? To an engineer, that cup is twice as large as it needs to be. Function is always more important than form, unless you're Apple.