[Hitch]

Originally Posted by AlexBell

Please note that this post is addressed to readers, not writers or poets.

Firstly, my guess is that most people who read anthologies read them initially from start to finish, and then go back from time to time to re-read favourite poems or stories. Is that what you do?

No. I read whatever I want. I'm surprised to see that some people read them F-2-B. I cherry pick. I don't always want everything that's in an anthology. {shrug}.

I have done tables of content for the poems and stories, and have put links after each poem or story back to the main poem and story contents so that people can find a particular poem or story and then find another one without having to page through from the first one he or she wants to re-read to the next one. Does this make sense?

Not sure why you have the jumps BACK. I don't think I understand the "main poem" idea, but I'm pretty sure that 95% of all e-readers out there still standing, if not 100%, have a linked TOC now, both in ePUB and in MOBI. Why not just leave the "go to" TOC or the ncx?

Secondly, many of the poems have long lines - fifty or sixty characters in the line - and because only about forty characters fit on a line at the font size I prefer this forces the line to break. The poets who wrote the poems have indicated to the publisher that they expect that people reading these poems will choose to read that poem in landscape orientation. They don't want the lines indented after a forced break. What would you do? Would you be willing to change orientation on your reader if it seemed that there had been forced breaks to the line? Would you like to see something like 'Best read in landscape orientation?'

I don't understand why you would have "forced line breaks?" Why not just use CSS to auto-indent any line that breaks when it reaches the margin? There's tons of examples out there, from Joshua to Liz Castro. I think forcing breaks (if they are not the actual end of the line, mind you) is a really bad idea for a zillion reasons.

Having done a fair bit of poetry work, I know how difficult the authors of poetry can be about visual presentation, but I think it is beyond unrealistic for them to "expect that people reading these poems will choose to read that poem in landscape orientation. " I mean, really? Who does that? I don't, and on my NookColor, and my Fire, if I rotate the device, I usually have it set to give me two columns, which certainly won't give the readers what the client(s) think they're giving the readers. My (non-scientific) poll of my clients indicates that most of them read in portrait, firstly, and on the rare occasions that they read in landscape, they're using two-column (page) mode. I don't see that dog hunting for poetry.

I say, code the lines to work properly with an indented wrap, and let the readers choose if they want to read it in portrait or landscape. You're effectively trying to force readers to read a "fixed format book" in an orientation most truly don't use...and worse, if like me, that won't do what you think it will, anyway. And if it's highly formatted/stylized (for example, the ubiquitous word strategically placed half-way across the page), you just may have to decline the job. I've turned down tons of poetry when it became clear to me that using a reflowable book would never give the client what s/he would demand. That's the road to hell and Endless Revisions. Endless Revisions is the name given to Dante's 11th Level of Hell.

FWIW.

Hitch