Can't eBooks be beautiful if they're not designed?

[darryl]

Originally Posted by ekbell

It's also true that most of the pbooks I actually own are worn and battered things where the only beauty to be found is in the writing itself.

Exactly. All I require is that the beautiful writing be easy for me to read as my eyesight is not getting better with age.

[pdurrant]

It is true that the current ebook standards make it very hard, if not impossible, to do things that should be simple, and so make formatting ebooks to look good a lot harder than it should be.

* No good way to do drop capitals, either of images or characters.
* No good way to do raised capitals without affecting the line spacing of the first line, or forcing line spacing to a fixed value.
* No good way to make an image and caption fit a full page
* (display software problem) No consistent way to do proper smallcaps
* No good way to properly format poetry (e.g. wrapping lines so the wrapped part is aligned right)

And those are just the ones that immediately spring to mind.

[Katsunami]

In my opinion, this is only a bunch of designers moaning about the fact that they are losing control of "their" e-books. The same happened 10-15 years ago; designers approached websites as if they were posters. They wanted users to not be able to change the fonts, the sizes of the elements, and they wanted the 'back' button disabled. The current trend is to make huge sticky menu's and headers, use huge white spaces, and tiny, light gray fonts because it 'looks slick and modern'; for many people, those websites are actually unusable.

For me, the entire point of an e-reader is that you can choose your own font type and size, your own line spacing, and your own margins (which is, or is not useful depending on the reader).

A book can be designed beautifully, but if it has a 6pt grey font on reflective paper, I probably can't read it, so it's then useless to me. Except for the cover, most books I read (novels) don't require any design apart from maybe the chapter headers. The rest is all about making the book as readable as possible.

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by Phogg

That is undebatably a gross ooverstatement.

I have more than half of these in my bedroom bookcase.

Since I see nothing beautiful about any of those, I'm pretty sure the word you were looking for was "debatably."

[Doonge]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

It is true that the current ebook standards make it very hard, if not impossible, to do things that should be simple, and so make formatting ebooks to look good a lot harder than it should be.

* No good way to do drop capitals, either of images or characters.
* No good way to do raised capitals without affecting the line spacing of the first line, or forcing line spacing to a fixed value.
* No good way to make an image and caption fit a full page
* (display software problem) No consistent way to do proper smallcaps
* No good way to properly format poetry (e.g. wrapping lines so the wrapped part is aligned right)

And those are just the ones that immediately spring to mind.

I'm interested in some details (just curiosity). Except for the first point (drop cases), which I know are impossible to do correctly currently ( https://drafts.csswg.org/css-inline/...letter-styling ), and small-caps (software problem indeed).

I haven't spend a huge time with this, so I think it will not be difficult for you to turn my mind around. Here's my "à-priori" about each of the subsequent points:

- What's the problem with line-height? It should allow you to do raised capitals without line spacing problem (character spacing however between your capital and the following letter remains a problem).
- What's the problem with applying a "max-height: 90%;" (for instance) value to your image inside a container, following a caption? I guess it might be annoying if the caption is multiline?
- Can't you just use 'text-align: right;' and some right-padding/margin for your poetry?

Thanks.

[shalym]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

Since I see nothing beautiful about any of those, I'm pretty sure the word you were looking for was "debatably."

Exactly. I can honestly say that I've never bought a book because of how it looked (or smelled) I buy books because I want to read the story that is in them, or, in the case of reference books, because I'm interested in the information in them.

In my life, books are not art, and I usually don't even look at the cover long enough to remember what it looked like.

The package doesn't matter...only the words contained in the package. As long as I can read the book, that's truly all that matters to me.

Shari

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by Doonge

- What's the problem with line-height? It should allow you to do raised capitals without line spacing problem (character spacing however between your capital and the following letter remains a problem).

Default line spacing is often a percentage of the character size (e.g. 120%). Using a large character on a line (e.g. raised capital) increases the line spacing, making the first line of the first paragraph become separated from the other lines. This is bad.

Originally Posted by Doonge

- - What's the problem with applying a "max-height: 90%;" (for instance) value to your image inside a container, following a caption? I guess it might be annoying if the caption is multiline?

Applying a max-height 90% will fix it sometimes. But it isn't reliable.

[QUOTE=Doonge;3324748]- - Can't you just use 'text-align: right;' and some right-padding/margin for your poetry?QUOTE]

No, you can't.
Lines in poetry are usually left-aligned, sometimes with additional fixed space at the start of some lines. If the display width and font size cause a line to wrap, ONLY the wrapped portion should be right aligned, to indicate that it's a wrap and not a new line.

I wandered lonely as a
                    cloud
That floats on high o'er
          vales and hills

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by shalym

In my life, books are not art, and I usually don't even look at the cover long enough to remember what it looked like.

Same here. I can appreciate beautiful artwork (wherever I encounter it), but I typically don't even consider cover art a part of the book. Especially in this day and age where authors (other than indie authors) rarely have any input in what art goes on the cover of their book anyway. It's eye-candy that I look at and, then promptly forget about (I quite often threw away a hardback's dustcover. Those things were a PITA).

I don't do picture books (unless the author has done the illustrations--a la Brom); I don't really care if the first letter is dropped or raised, so "pretty" doesn't enter in to it.

"Competent and clean" allows me to forget about any packaging-as-art nonsense and focus on the content--where the real beauty lies. Everything else is usually just individual (and highly subjective) fetish. A fetish that ebooks/ereaders actually accommodates better than print.

I'm exempting books containing (and/or) about visual art, of course.

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by shalym

Exactly. I can honestly say that I've never bought a book because of how it looked (or smelled) I buy books because I want to read the story that is in them, or, in the case of reference books, because I'm interested in the information in them.

Well, I did buy the illustrated Hobbit/LotR/.../other books, even though I had then already, both in paper and as ebooks. I did also buy some other stories as illustrated paper books because of the illustrations.

[kovidgoyal]

@pdurrant: While it is indeed not possible to have wrapped lines be right aligned -- one can get a decent effect where wrapped lines are offset from the parent line by using negative indents. See the epub advanced formatting demo here: http://manual.calibre-ebook.com/conv...ormatting-demo

[MGlitch]

You may not consciously buy a book because of the cover, in fact I'd wager this is actually true for the majority of books that are purchased, but that cover does have some affect on you. It may just be as simple as catching your eye, or a neat juxtaposition of images and the text.

I'm not saying books with poorly designed covers aren't purchased, nor that there is a universal 'good' design across all the subjects of books. But within the subjects there are trends. You can see it best with genre fiction, especially if you take the time to go to the sub-genre level.

All that said, the inside of a book can be well crafted with these stylish raised capitals, etc. etc. but when it comes down to it I want to -read- the book. I often find the more stylistic choices that are taken with print books to be annoying. I do wish things like images were handled better but I think that's more a limitation of the ereader than the ebook.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

@pdurrant: While it is indeed not possible to have wrapped lines be right aligned -- one can get a decent effect where wrapped lines are offset from the parent line by using negative indents

AKA "hanging indent". But as you say, it's not actually what's required.

My point wasn't to ask for suggestions as to how these effects could be approximated or best worked-around. It was to point out that these relatively simple formatting tasks are still not addressed by ebook standards, and now the standards bodies have wandered off to working on adding multi-media and god-knows-what.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by MGlitch

I do wish things like images were handled better but I think that's more a limitation of the ereader than the ebook.

To some extent it's an ereader software problem. But the formats do not allow, for example, an easy way to specify a low-res version for display in-line and a high-res version for to be displayed if the reader 'zooms in' on an illustration.

[dwig]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

I...
* (display software problem) No consistent way to do proper smallcaps
...

With the exception of small caps failing when the user overrides the book's design by using a ereader config that ignores the book's CSS, small caps can be done properly in exactly the same way they are done properly in printed books. The one and only way to do proper small caps is to use a well crafted small cap font.

While there are people that will argue otherwise, faking small caps by scaling the regular caps, whether in ebooks or print, is a cheap kluge that results in less than the best appearance as the scaled caps are lighter than either the full size caps or full size lower case. It is true that there is no consistent way to do "cheap and dirty faux" smallcaps, but this tread is about good design.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by dwig

While there are people that will argue otherwise, faking small caps by scaling the regular caps, whether in ebooks or print, is a cheap kluge that results in less than the best appearance as the scaled caps are lighter than either the full size caps or full size lower case. It is true that there is no consistent way to do "cheap and dirty faux" smallcaps, but this tread is about good design.

I agree that good smallcaps relies on having a properly designed smallcaps version of a font.

What is absent from the major ePub rendering software (ADE) at the moment is any support for the smallcaps CSS attribute. A good ebook renderer would

(a) support the text attributes that it is required to do by the standard
(b) use a small cap font to do so when it's available.

One can, I agree, embed a proper smallcaps font, but this does not actually help when the user of the reading software chooses a different font for the body text.

Good ebook design should not depend on the use of a specific body text font.