Quote:
Originally Posted by ahi
There are three reasons why people on this board claim to prefer reflow eBooks instead of professionally typeset eBooks (which, most of them, have never even seen before): (1) they value some other aspect of eBooks too much to feel like they have a right to complain about the appearance; (2) they, like most people, do not notice typography... and since due to convenience factors they now read mostly eBooks, they are rarely confronted with the quality difference between professionaly typeset works and eBooks and are unaware of the subtle ways in which their reading experience is negatively impacted; and (3) they want to stick it to the pretentious jackass that's acting like they can see some mysterious aesthetic difference between one set of bunch of letters on a page and another set of bunch of letters on another page.
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(4) most people don't care, and I think I can prove it.
How would you rate the typesetting of Baen?
Over the summer I borrowed about 300 books from the library and scanned the cover, title page, chapter headings, scene breaks, etc. I was looking for examples on how to do typesetting.
One thing I noticed was that Baen was consistently the least sophisticated typesetter of all the SF publishers. They used almost no dingbats, the title pages were much simpler, the scene breaks were less interesting, and Baen would rarely change the font or formatting (to indicate a telepathic thought, for example). And this is in their hardbacks, not ebooks.
If typesetting were really that important, then why is Baen so successful? I would argue that it's because hardly anyone notices. I've even raised the topic a few times here on MR. No one seemed to care (not that I'm criticizing anyone).