Overdrive CEO hints Kindle Library launching this Sept

[anamardoll]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

I agree most are not arguing that point. But the few who are, are ridiculously vocal about it.

I filter it out.

But seriously, is anyone seriously arguing that Kindlers shouldn't have library access? I see lots of complaints about the wait times, but that's another kettle of fish -- you can be annoyed about that without saying "A kindle owner shouldn't be allowed to use the library."

This wouldn't even make logical sense: Kindle owners can use the library already to read on their computer.

Now if the argument is that Amazon's handling of this whole thing is wrong, well, that's also another kettle, imho.

[Prestidigitweeze]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

I agree most are not arguing that point. But the few who are, are ridiculously vocal about it.

How are they supposed to make a non-vocal point (non-vocal in the sense of not overtly stated or expressed)?

You have a person who was afraid of Kindle owners receiving an unfair advantage, but who then gained more knowledge of how the process worked. Ultimately, he conceded.

You have a few others complaining about the wait times that might ensue once a larger group of readers descends on the library.

The first point is moot and the second is one with which I don't agree. But I see nothing wrong with people raising objections even when the objections seem oddly undemocratic.

Given equal time, a decent argument should only be refined by opposing arguments.

[DiapDealer]

You have a person who was afraid of Kindle owners receiving an unfair advantage, but who then gained more knowledge of how the process worked. Ultimately, he conceded.

Because this was the only thread about this topic over the last several months, and Wolfie was the only one that took that particular premature stance, right? Repeatedly, annoyingly and now obviously unwarranted-ly.

My, how my recent posts in the general section, seem to have attracted your admittedly impressive logical dissection skills. I'm flattered.

[Prestidigitweeze]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

Because this was the only thread about this topic over the last several months, and Wolfie was the only one that took that particular premature stance, right? Repeatedly, annoyingly and now obviously unwarranted-ly.

I don't know that JS's concerns were unwarranted before he learned they had been addressed, any more than I think they were less valid for being repeated on various threads. If people didn't wish to engage him, they didn't have to.

As to JS's actual point: I've disagreed with him and agreed with you for most of this thread.

That doesn't mean, however, that I think someone who disagrees with us strenuously should be dismissed by you or even insulted by others.

My, how my recent posts in the general section, seem to have attracted your admittedly impressive logical dissection skills. I'm flattered.

You needn't feel singled out and you certainly aren't being belittled or stalked.

It really is a coincidence that the last two posts to which I responded were yours. They appeared after posts of mine (roughly) on threads to which I'd subscribed.

I might be responding to you publicly on this thread, but I'm not attacking you personally or targeting you in general -- if I've given you that impression, then I apologize. We might disagree from time to time, but I bear you no ill will.

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze

I don't know that JS's concerns were unwarranted before he learned they had been addressed, any more than I think they were less valid for being repeated on various threads

You honestly don't think that "jumping the gun" (so to speak) before all (or even any) of the facts are in deserves to be pointed out and/or discouraged? I agree there's no need to insult, but it's hard for me to ignore rampant fear-mongering. In fact I won't really consider ignoring it. There's plenty of known atrocities to get worked up over without resorting to freaking out over perceived atrocities, or even straw-atrocities that may not ever even see the light of day.

And the fact of the matter is that the general public still doesn't have any internal details about how this new system is going to work. It may very well suck in practice... but that still won't justify getting worked up about largely invented problems based on wild-ass, premature, uninformed guesses.

I might be responding to you publicly on this thread, but I'm not attacking you personally or targeting you in general -- if I've given you that impression, then I apologize. We might disagree from time to time, but I bear you no ill will.

Not at all... I was just amused, is all. I'm not used to having my (primarily) gut reactions so logically analysed.

[Ankh]

Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze

Can't be done reliably, as in, formatted not once ultra-carefully but through an entire book with multiple indents, and not by an expert programmer but by an ordinary poet, and by publishing house grunts who wish to lay out/automate hundreds of pages as quickly as possible. .

With all due respect, Prestidigitweeze, a complex layout like that was, is, and likely will be destined to be a job for the master typesetter, and definitely not for "grunts" working under the insane deadlines, who are rarely paid to deliver the masterpiece.

There is a (commercially) limited interest for these titles, hence limited demand for tools to automate/support such a job... When and if those titles are properly digitized, it will be done either by enthusiasts or as a show-off piece worthy of the resume and/or presentation to the potential customers.

[Prestidigitweeze]

Originally Posted by Ankh

With all due respect, Prestidigitweeze, a complex layout like that was, is, and likely will be destined to be a job for the master typesetter, and definitely not for "grunts" working under the insane deadlines, who are rarely paid to deliver the masterpiece.

My point is that such layouts are really simply a matter of multiple indent levels.

I've laid out books requiring multiple indents in Word, various DTP apps over the decades, manual typewriters and even letter press. I've converted them into pdfs without issue. Trust me when I say I'm far from a master of formatting or typesetting. Multiple indents are supposed to be easy.

If what I'm talking about were difficult to render in any but our current quirky formats (ePub, mobi, LRF, etc.), then verse in visual/prosodic stanza forms wouldn't have been as common as the nursery rhyme (nor included the nursery rhyme!) for the past eight hundred years.

There is a (commercially) limited interest for these titles, hence limited demand for tools to automate/support such a job...

With all due respect, I don't recall hearing there was a limited interest in the poetry of Poe, Shakespeare, Baudelaire, Dowson, Yeats, Valery, Thomas Hardy, Donne, Alabaster, Herbert, Keats, Bryon, Shelley, etc., etc. Their visual stanza forms are only compromised in eBook editions, never in printed form.

Here's something I've noticed on Mobile Read:-- Many of us seem to feel our own personal tastes are normative, and that a consensus on our favorite internet forums can answer any question re broad public opinion. If we don't care about an issue, we imagine that readers probably don't care anywhere else. We sometimes assume, for one thing, that narrative prose is the only writing that anyone could possibly be interested in reading. From this some of us might deduce that narrative prose is the only literature worth preserving, studying and popularizing.

But if you can't remember what pre-eBook poetry looked like in its original and intended form, then it's possible you haven't read poetry carefully enough.

Leaving aside the problems with forming conclusions about the popularity of a given work from the past eight centuries using only inductive reasoning and local consensus, perhaps it's meaningful to ask a different question:

Would the format of a collection of poems be important to you if you knew it was vastly important to the author -- that in fact what we're calling formatting is actually part of the structure of the poetry itself? Would you be persuaded to consider the idea if the poets I mean were not "of limited interest" but were in fact more famous and popular than any writer on Mobile Read dare hope to be?

How forbidding and limited in appeal do you think ordinary readers find Vladimir Nabokov, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Wallace Stevens, W.S. Merwin (North America's poet laureate for ages), Allen Ginsberg, Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg or Vachel Lindsay? All of them would recognize their poetry in pdfs converted easily from Word. Not so the equivalent effort in ePub or mobi.

So far as I can tell, this seems a question of the limits of the formats and not the formatter.

[Ankh]

Darn, I missed this post up until now. My apologies for the delay.

Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze

Here's something I've noticed on Mobile Read:-- Many of us seem to feel our own personal tastes are normative, and that a consensus on our favorite internet forums can answer any question re broad public opinion.

When I said "commercially limited" I really thought of the percentage of publishing profits generated by poetry sales. It was not a projection of my taste, just a standard logical fallacy, any generalization is dangerous. Now that it was called to my attention, I can not even find any data to support what I believed was "a common knowledge", that novels, in general, generate more sales than poetry or short story collections.

The problem, if there is one, is not that Ankh is putting poetry down. Sorry for misunderstanding, I should have been more precise.

[Prestidigitweeze]

Originally Posted by Ankh

Sorry for misunderstanding, I should have been more precise.

Not a problem, Ankh. We're all wrong on a regular basis, but admitting it in public is one of the most adult things anyone can do. I admire you for that.

I wouldn't bring up issues with eBook formatting unless I'd deduced they were intrinsic to the structure of the work itself. Poetry is a key example, but it isn't the only one.

Until they're dealth with, basic formatting limitations will circumscribe the reach of eBooks, and will force readers who care to retain at least a partial investment in printed books. Just now, I was on the phone with the publisher of a magazine I co-edit. We do eBook versions of our printed books, and a monthly Kindle edition of our blogged articles, fiction and poetry, but the magazine itself only exists in web and printed editions. This is because of layout issues with mobi and ePub and we're not the only magazine to have encountered the problem.

I suspect this might have something to do with copyright protection and attempts to make reverse engineering impossible, but the end result is less control over design and typography than any self-respecting graphic design person finds tolerable. No eBook format should be less flexible than the most basic letterpress. I once used a letterpress to lay out a chapbook to achieve an antique look, so I'm speaking literally, not making an analogy.

Here's what would be great: If Amazon, Sony and B&N all agreed to back a single extended format in addition to their proprietary ones. For many books in prose, ePub and mobi could suffice. But for more involved layouts, and fewer issues than pdfs create, there could exist this additional format, which would allow the ePublication of poetry, format-dependent magazines and structurally challenging books like Glas. It would also allow for the reproductino of unusual formatting within otherwise conventional novels (cf. alternating narrative strings at the end of Jim Thompson's Hell of a Woman or the synesthetic typography at the end of Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination).

[Kali Yuga]

Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze

Until they're dealth with, basic formatting limitations will circumscribe the reach of eBooks, and will force readers who care to retain at least a partial investment in printed books.... No eBook format should be less flexible than the most basic letterpress.

Formats like ePub and Mobi are radically different than typesetting a printed page; they're designed for the end-user to change font size, to use a variety of screen sizes, even different fonts.

PDF, in contrast, is designed to more closely replicate the experience of a printed page. It is perfectly capable of dealing with columns, text boxes, illustrations, specified fonts, indentations, and whatever else you're used to with a letterpress.

In other words, the "flexibility" with ebook formats gets shifted from the designer to the end-user. If the designer needs to exert near-total control, you need to use a different format, such as PDF.

Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze

I suspect [typographic issues] might have something to do with copyright protection and attempts to make reverse engineering impossible, but the end result is less control over design and typography than any self-respecting graphic design person finds tolerable.

Nope, it's purely a technical aspect of those formats. ePub is an open format and mobi is basically a wrapper on HTML. There's already an open source app (Calibre) which can convert ePub, Mobi etc to dozens of other formats. If for some reason you can't access the content, that's because someone put DRM on it, which is unrelated to format.

Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze

Here's what would be great: If Amazon, Sony and B&N all agreed to back a single extended format in addition to their proprietary ones.

They do. It's called PDF.

Amazon's PDF support is somewhat lacking, but everyone else is pretty much on board, as much as the devices allow. If someone formats a color PDF for 8.5" x 11" and you've got a 7" diagonal eInk screen, you're not going to have good results no matter what.

You might have some issues with the dominant distribution channels (e.g. Amazon will only take mobi), but there are plenty of other ways to distribute your content.

[JSWolf]

I do see where Prestidigitweeze is coming from. The problem is that PDF is useless in most cases. You cannot make just one PDF for all situations. It just doesn't work.

What's needed is a format (or extend ePub) that allows more formatting options for more advanced formatting that also allows font size changing and reflowing on a variety of screen sizes. PDF reflow is a mess.

[Kali Yuga]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I do see where Prestidigitweeze is coming from. The problem is that PDF is useless in most cases. You cannot make just one PDF for all situations. It just doesn't work.

It doesn't have to work for all situations, or even most situations. The point is that if the designer needs a high level of control over the layout, PDF is the best current option.

Most ebook readers support PDF, thus his request is basically already fulfilled.

Originally Posted by JSWolf

What's needed is a format (or extend ePub) that allows more formatting options for more advanced formatting that also allows font size changing and reflowing on a variety of screen sizes. PDF reflow is a mess.

That's not going to help much. A document with a highly specific layout can't efficiently reflow at all.

Consider the example from Derrida's Glas that he linked, here's a page in English translation:



There's absolutely no way that a modified version of ePub, mobi or any other ebook-oriented format will properly render that text properly in most situations. As long as you allow reflow, user modification of font sizes, and/or try to show it on a small screen, the layout will be destroyed -- along with the author's intent to use typography and layout as part of his commentary on margins, marginalized views, textual interplay etc.

Of course, I wouldn't object to an updated spec that improves layout, but that isn't going to solve the fundamental issue posed by using a highly structured layout in a medium where the end-users will have variable parameters.

In contrast, PDF is not perfect but it can preserve complex layouts, like the example above or poetry journals.

[JSWolf]

The sample page could be done with reflow if you make it one column. If it has to be two columns, it's not going to be display well enough on a 6" or smaller screen.

[kjk]

Originally Posted by Kali Yuga

There's absolutely no way that a modified version of ePub, mobi or any other ebook-oriented format will properly render that text properly in most situations. As long as you allow reflow, user modification of font sizes, and/or try to show it on a small screen, the layout will be destroyed -- along with the author's intent to use typography and layout as part of his commentary on margins, marginalized views, textual interplay etc.

Of course, I wouldn't object to an updated spec that improves layout, but that isn't going to solve the fundamental issue posed by using a highly structured layout in a medium where the end-users will have variable parameters.

In contrast, PDF is not perfect but it can preserve complex layouts, like the example above or poetry journals.

I have to admit that personally, since getting an iPad, that PDFs just don't bother me that much any more They were impossible for me to enjoy on the Sony 505 (and the iPhone, even with reflow), but I just don't really have problems reading PDFs now. (The exception being some magazines). I think if/when the iPad resolution doubles in the near future, they will be even less of an issue.

[RockdaMan]

Originally Posted by kjk

since getting an iPad, that PDFs just don't bother me that much any more