Quote:
Originally Posted by Elfwreck
If one is in the habit of cracking them open to fix things (like em-based margins that grow as you increase the font size), or you want to combine several into one ebook to make an omnibus, the lack of standardization is horribly frustrating.
Learning how to make ebooks is difficult--people make badly formatted ebooks (by which I mean: noticeable to readers; no bold in chapter headers, or random italicized paragraphs, etc.) because if they stray from their tutorial's exact system and borrow advice from something else (perhaps because their tutorial didn't cover the details that the book needs), they run the risk of creating an unreadable mess.
And of course, making ebooks according to one tutorial doesn't mean the ebook will work on the device you want, or be sellable in the store you want.
So, yeah, lack of standardization is a problem. It's just not a problem that matters to many people--and for them, it matters in different ways--so there aren't going to be any simple, over-arching solutions anytime soon.
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Elfwreck:
I am
absolutely the last person you'll ever get an argument from on that score (that lack of standardization is a problem). You've all seen me bitch about it here, on too many occasions.
I guess my viewpoint, though, coming from very jaded eyes, is that given Apple's behavior and Amazon's,
it's not going to change. Apple drove the last ePUB3 bus; we all know that. IMHO, the "NCX is dying" aspect of ePUB3 was a stupid move, and the whole push for multimedia, over standardization of content is...I won't type here the word that describes how I think about
that. If Apple hadn't utterly (again, IMHO) screwed the standardization issue by pushing ePUB3 in that direction (
oooooh, flashy pretty thingies!), instead of focusing on simplifying and conforming ePUB2++, I would have retained some hope, but once I saw the ePUB3 final specs, I gave up on the idea.
I don't think Amazon will adapt to ePUB3's direction, not really...I don't see either side as being willing to give ground, and I think that leaves folks like me stuck in the "make two books" rut (now, the make 3 books rut, if you count Smashwords' idiotic requirements, and maybe 4, if you throw in a Kobo version). That's all I'm saying.
And I don't really think that standardization was the original point of the OP, per se; but...I guess we all got here from there. My original take was that he had certain impressions about what constituted "good" coding versus "bad," and while I think most of us can agree that embedding 4 spans to do one thing is silliness, and not "neat," y'know, as I said earlier, ebooks are sausage, and there's a lot of ways to get to a bolded chapter header.
And, of course, most of us here would likely agree on a "badly-made ebook" when we saw it; probably you, me, mrmikel, Diap, even our resident curmudgeon (excepting TOC discussions, LOL), etc. We all know crap when we see it. And if you get a lot of crap books that you have to rip apart to make your reading experience better, I can understand that (margins, etc.) without hesitation. But I do think that a lot of the OTHER--use em versus a spanned class, etc., is a bit of tail-wagging-the-dog. But, hey, that's why we have Vanilla, Chocolate, and, of course, Coffee Heath-Bar Crunch ice cream, right?
@mrmikel: One em if by land, one span if by sea....
Hitch