Set First Page

[Arios]

...And all these little problems (text ragged right or not? non breaking space, so so drop caps...) raise the question of the autonomy of digital formats.

Are we still in the wake of Gutenberg or in the wake of medias with reflowing formats? And these medias can they, by themselves, have formats of their own? Is it necessary to always just copy paper books, rather than trying to create something new, more adapted to the "digital material"?

If the printing press (see the old but still interesting 1979 book of E.Eisenstein) has had a strong effect in changing mentalities, can it be true of digital media?

I know I know! Besides being pedantic, these questions are probably for another post.

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by Arios

.Is it necessary to always just copy paper books, rather than trying to create something new, more adapted to the "digital material"?

For my own part; no. I don't think the digital book needs to mirror the state of the physical book that happened to be in vogue when digital books started becoming "mainstream." The ebook should be allowed to evolve the way its predecessor did.

Except for things that naturally lend themselves to a fixed layout (cookbooks, art books, etc), I believe the "layout" of the text (in a mainly narrative type work) is eventually going to be taken completely out of the hands of those who create the content (or the "book") and given to the reader/reader app.

Archetypal structures like body text, dialogue, letter, hand-written letter, newspaper clipping, map, ... etc will be loosely defined by the book, but will be presented in a manner decided by readers' preferences and their chosen reading devices/apps.

Things are just going to be quite contentious for a while, until content providers relinquish their deathgrip on "layout," that's all.

[eschwartz]

But... but... but... artistic license!
You hateful monster!

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

But... but... but... artistic license!
You hateful monster!

I'm sure there will always be a special Anal-Retentive genre/format for those who want to waste their artistic talent dictating every aspect of how their content will be presented on a screen (which reading devices/apps will subsequently override/ignore).

[theducks]

Looking at my MM Paperback collection, I see some evolution.
(mostly) Better cover art.
Chapter breaks onto a new page (yes, new chapters could start in the middle of a page of text
Longer books (IMHO Quality still counts over quantity)
Interior art / or fleuron

Drastic change... Nope

[cybmole]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

I'm sure there will always be a special Anal-Retentive genre/format for those who want to waste their artistic talent dictating every aspect of how their content will be presented on a screen (which reading devices/apps will subsequently override/ignore).

It's called PDF

[Notjohn]

Originally Posted by Arios

...And all these little problems (text ragged right or not? non breaking space, so so drop caps...) raise the question of the autonomy of digital formats.

Are we still in the wake of Gutenberg or in the wake of medias with reflowing formats? And these medias can they, by themselves, have formats of their own? Is it necessary to always just copy paper books, rather than trying to create something new, more adapted to the "digital material"?

If the printing press (see the old but still interesting 1979 book of E.Eisenstein) has had a strong effect in changing mentalities, can it be true of digital media?

No doubt true, but actually as websites evolve I see them moving toward print appearances rather than vice-versa, with justified text no longer uncommon. (I still use ragged right, however.)

The important issue for those of us who make a living this way is what people are most likely to buy. Give that best-selling e-books (I use the Wall Street Journal list, because the New York Times is too dignified to include self-published books on its august Lists) are justified, almost without exception, I will continue to use justification in my books.

I have a hundred or so books on my Fire HD. Only one is ragged right. I did read another (the Daniel Allon thriller) that I downloaded from the public library--again, the only unjustified book of scores of library books I have downloaded over the past couple of years.

I want my books to look familiar to the people who buy books similar to the ones I buy (or borrow).

[exaltedwombat]

I've never quite understood why we've bothered with EPUB3 when we have HTML5.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

Theoretically setting the Text semantic should mark a file as the location to first open to, I don't know which ereaders will support it however. The Kindle definitely does (although as DiapDealer pointed out, KDP seeems to arbitrarily change that, sometimes, when uploading).
@Hitch claims to have found a fix for that, but since her job is to process and polish peoples' ebooks, I don't blame her for refusing to share a trade secret. <snippage>

Yes. I suck that way. I just...I've simply learnt the hard way that my unselfishness for the first 3+ years of posting hither and yon was, in my eyes, taken advantage of. First by folks who suddenly decided that they'd become "eBook formatters," claiming to be The First Ones (*Babylon5 geeks will get that), -after having effectively learned the tricky stuff from me and others like me on forums, and secondly by others. It is one of those things that irks me; my "real" self wants to be chatty and share-y like everyone else, but my "biz" self reminds me that I got screwed over more than once by sharing. And in an ever-decreasing marketplace, I simply have to try to hang on. Above and beyond myself, I have employees that need the work. The same thing is now true of the fonts issue...I'm just not going to share about it. Believe me: I don't like it. But I JUST this week saw something I'd said regurgitated over at the KDP as if it were (someone else's) original thought, and...well. I've said what I need to say about it.

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

I liken it to someone asking a publisher/printer to arrange it so their physical book is weighted and balanced in such a way that it opens to a very specific page whenever a reader drops it spine-first on a table.

There's no real point to it, IMO. You can't make people read stuff they don't want to (or skip stuff they don't want to), so open the ebook and let the reader find where they want to start. They're readers... they have a lot of experience doing just this. They don't need any help. And if Amazon (since this is mostly their fault to begin with for trying to automatically find the "very best beginning point") wants to change things so books open at--or immediately following--the html ToC, then make sure nothing you deem "too important for the reader to miss out on" comes before that html ToC and have done.

I understand pros (like Hitch and others) are compelled by paying customers to "make this work," (and have to try and do so--bless their souls) but that doesn't stop me from believing that their paying customers are making mountains out of mole hills. Just rearrange the book so Amazon's diddling can't accidentally cause a reader to "start" too far into the thing and move on.

The SRL is giant, soul-sucking waste of time (on both sides of the equation). It's like spending enormous amounts of time, money, and resources on creating an automated system to detect which way you need to tilt your boot to dump the water out of it.

Yes. In fairness to myself and other BookHo's like me, the biggest issue, in our eyes, is not forcing the reader to do X, nor even (really) satisfying the customer's desire that the book "open at my dedication," or what-have-you. The issue is, self-defense. When Amazon's automated "helpfulness" started putting the SRL in various and sundry REALLY incorrect locations, those of us who are being paid to at least PRETEND to be professional (smile), had to find workarounds to rectify the problem.

Otherwise, quite honestly, I'd have stuck with immediately-after-the-cover, which gives EVERYBODY their own choices, pretty quickly. I think it's easier to open at the Title or Praise page, and click "Go to Beginning," if you want to skip to the first text page of the book, than it is to open at Ch. 1, and feel as though you have to page backwards, "just in case" there was a Preface or epigraph or something else that you may have missed.

Offered FWIW.

Hitch

[cybmole]

Maybe I am mean but I detest and edit out everything that comes before the story, in my reading copies. Dedications are the worst, why do I need to know or care that the tome is dedicated to some random relative, or worse some random initials. If I go to a movie there is no opening scene where main actor gets to say I dedicate this role to auntie dotty.
So for once I am with amazon on where to open at. And that is enough channelling of Katie Hopkins for today.

[cybmole]

And peeve 2 is the arty smarty epigraph, which is where the author quotes some obscure dead white guy, usually, to prove that he/she is better educated than you will ever be.
Now , shall I mention acknowledgments-, there's thankfully no five minutes at end of movie where actors namecheck everyone they ever met, so why do novelists feel the need...

[DiapDealer]

I never realized that so many people were hating on stuff that's so dead simple to skip.

It's interesting that all your comparisons are to movies. Do/did you remaster your DVDs to remove the opening/ending credits, or did you just not watch them?

[PeterT]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

I never realized that so many people were hating on stuff that's so dead simple to skip.

Especially as some of these are only apparent the first time a book is openned; after that it would reopen to the last read location.

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by cybmole

Maybe I am mean but I detest and edit out everything that comes before the story...

@cybmole - Back in the bad old days of dead tree books can I presume you ripped out all those pesky pages at the front of a book, and used them to . . . er . . . light your fire?

BR

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by cybmole

And peeve 2 is the arty smarty epigraph, which is where the author quotes some obscure dead white guy, usually, to prove that he/she is better educated than you will ever be.

Quick question: why would you want to read a book by someone to whom you attribute those kind of motives/intentions? And how does editing it out help you ignore that the author wants you to feel like you're dumber than them? It just doesn't make much sense to me that you'd want to read the work of people you apparently feel such spite toward.

Don't get me wrong; I have no problem at all with you not wanting to read that stuff. I just think it would be a lot easier to tap the page-turn button (or screen), than to manufacture an imaginary agenda on the part of the author to make you feel inferior for buying their book and reading it.