Quote:
Originally Posted by Elfwreck
Have you seen the ePub Zen Garden? (Although I suspect that a number of the styles wouldn't work on some portable devices; they may not support all the coding options.)
Setting aside *good* formatting--for a lot of people, basic text is sufficient, and "well-formatted" means - The line breaks are in the right places,
- Extra line between paragraphs *or* indented paragraphs,
- Lines don't wrap between double hyphens,
- No long gaps between words,
- Punctuation is accurate enough that it's not consciously noticed,
- New chapters start on a new page.
I read ebooks for two years on a Sony Clie 320x320 pixel screen, and would've been happy to continue; I had screen problems & battery problems. |
I've seen ePub Zen Garden, and yes it shows that decent markup is possible. I think when I made my post, I was reading too much into "formatting" and including typography in my judgment. If formatting is simply the markup, then it's fine. The samples on Zen Garden still look pretty mediocre though, and some of them are humorously bad. ePub champions defend it saying it's the problem of the viewing software and not the code itself, which is more or less true, but when there's no good viewing software, it's a bit of a bottleneck.
And yes I agree that the average Joe has low standards, but that's why I think it's usually a good idea to leave book typesetting to people who aren't the average Joe. Books that look like they were made by toddlers might be fine for average ebook users, but not everyone can handle paying for such things.
It's fine and good to take the "high road" and say that it's all about content and that presentation doesn't matter beyond legibility. I don't find that to be true, but my background has biased me in favor of good design. Reading straight text for me, just like reading a poorly-made book (electronic or otherwise), is a struggle. I notice the problems and they destroy the flow of reading for me...and I'm not anywhere near perfectionist. For me, it's like listening to a badly and inconsistently out-of-tune piano. Many won't consciously notice it, and some will even defend it as having "character", but for some, it's just a chore to tolerate.