Seriously thoughtful Book, Version 1.0, Automated

[Jack Tingle]

Occasionally I go off on a rant against bloated featuritis in software, including eBook software. One recently seemed almost sensible. I'll paraphrase for your amusement:
____________

"Sure, go ahead and bloat up your eReader (hard or software) with bizarre features. Just remember to give the user the switches to TURN IT OFF!"

I delineated and ranted about the nutball features I'd seen people propose for eReaders and ebooks. (We'll skip that part.)

Then it occured to me that a lot of the features that Book 1.0 had, eReader/ebook makers were ignoring. Working tables of contents, complete indices, well organized lists of tables, figures, and references, and (in extremis) concordances, all seem missing from most ebooks. Rather than imbedded 3-D video in our ebooks, how about a table of contents that actually works?

What else are we missing that Book 1.0 (when well crafted) has, but ebooks don't?

Regards,
Jack Tingle

[wodin]

Originally Posted by Jack Tingle

What else are we missing that Book 1.0 (when well crafted) has, but ebooks don't?

Page numbers that don't change. When I reference a passage from a book it would be nice to be able to say "half way down page 123" or "it says thus and such on page 73".

[Xenophon]

High-quality typography with good justification, kerning, etc. -- although just how high that quality is depends a lot on the workflow of the publisher. Ooops -- I almost forgot ligatures.

Much better contrast ratios than we see on current reader hardware.

Cheap books have better resolution, and high-quality printing (glossy magazines, textbooks, etc.) have incredibly better resolution than current reader hardware. On the order of 300DPI for cheap books, up to ~3000DPI for the high-quality printing vs. 180DPI for current readers.

A wide variety of formatting options (chosen ahead of print time, of course): multi-column, hand-optimized placement of figures, charts, and graphs, Drop-caps, and on and on.

Note that many of the above things could be improved in existing reader software without undue effort. For example, TeX does decent-but-not-outstanding justification and kerning (in part by doing decent-but-not-outstanding automatic hyphenation). Since TeX is free software, it ought to be possible to re-purpose their code (or at least their algorithms) for these tasks. Similarly, Apple has demonstrated that automatic use of available ligatures is reasonable to implement in modern software. That's not open source, however, so either eBook manufacturers or Adobe would have to replicate Apple's results.

Contrast ratio and resolution improvements depend directly on the hardware guys, though.

Xenophon

[Jack Tingle]

Some kind of position indicator that everyone can agree upon seems like a good idea, but be careful of fixed pages. They don't render well on all differnt readers.

So universal position standards, check.

I'm not sure about "high" resolution. One man's high is another man's mediocre. In some cases, I want "barely adequate" rather than "high".

The same may go for fancy typography, columnization, and figure placement. Each device will have to be able to interpret the ebook for its own best use. My 2.8" cell phone and my 17" LCD monitor have vastly different characteristics. I don't want 2 columns on the cell phone.

So, universal standards for how the same book is rendered on different sized and resolution screens, check.

Certainly automatic hyphenation and ligatures are a good area to improve. Printers have managed them for centuries, and some ebooks attempt them. Without standards for them, though, they become a boat-anchor for readabiltiy. Try reading a heavily hard-ligatured book on a device which doesn't understand them (shudder).

Standards for hyphenation and ligatures, check.

Note that none of the above require inventions, so much as common sense in hardware and software design.

Regards,
Jack Tingle

[Daithi]

Excellent points Jack Tingle. The Kindle 2.0 can read books to me and play MP3s, but I still can't display a Drop Cap, or flow text around an image like the images found in Alice in Wonderland, or display an ePub document, or display a PDF (even if it was designed for an 800x600 screen). Furthermore, poorly formatted books missing working tables of contents, indexes, covers, backcovers, images, italics, em-dashes, etc. are all quite common.

The blame for not providing support for standards like ePub and PDF lies squarely on the shoulders of manufatures like Amazon, but even poorly formatted books can be laid at the feet of Amazon as well. If they provided the tools to easily produce a nicely formatted ebook then there would be fewer badly formatted books. But maybe the next version will allow you to make phone calls.

[Xenophon]

Good points, Jack. On typography, what Apple has done is to build into the OS the capability to see the ligatures that are available in the font you are using. These ligatures are then automatically used in place of the appropriate letter pairs or triples found in the raw text. Of course they manage spacing/layout adjustments automatically as well. And provide a set of controls for the user to choose between (at least) no ligatures, common ligatures, fancy ligatures, and "go-berserk" ligatures. The point here is that the ligature support can be built into the software rather than being hard-coded in the source. The "advanced typography support" in Mac OS 10.5 also does a dandy job of automatic kerning (rather better than TeX, for example). Not so good at auto-hyphenation, however.

The other layout stuff that I mentioned seems to me to be stuff that needs a compromise between what the book designer wanted and what the device can reasonably do (and also what the USER wants to see!). Certainly it makes no sense to do multi-column on a tiny-screen device -- most of the time. Not sure what the right solution is, but it would be cool if ePub (say) was expressive enough for a book designer to specify their preferred layout, and for large-screen devices (or printing to paper!) to be able to re-create something quite close.

As far as resolution goes, hmmmm.... My observation is that with normal eyesight on standard office paper (or equivalent) and with text output it is trivial to distinguish 300 and 600 DPI from each other and from 1200 DPI output. Beyond 1200DPI, the differences get much more subtle. I'm told by some of the experts here on campus that 3KDPI represents roughly the limit of human perception in the absence of a loupe or magnifying glass. That's "limit" in the sense that there's no point in ratcheting up to finer dot-pitch 'cause almost no one will be able to tell the difference -- even trained professionals with excellent eye-sight. (I don't actually know this last from my own studies, so take it as hearsay.)

For my particular needs, I don't care about color. I don't care (much) about grey-scale levels. But I want my reader to have the cleanest sharpest text I can get! After all, I spend a lot of time looking at it.

I rather curious, though. When would you prefer "barely adequate" resolution?

Xenophon

[Jack Tingle]

Originally Posted by Xenophon

I rather curious, though. When would you prefer "barely adequate" resolution?

Xenophon

Most technologies have to make a compromise between contrast, gray scale, and resolution. There's also a problem with data transfer time at high resolutions. If I need a sunlight-readable, backlight-capable text display I'm willing to sacrifice resolution, so long as I can use gray-scaling to anti-alias. For that trick (principally on LCDs) you can't have long refresh cycles, hence lower resolution to limit data transfer rate.

E-ink gets around that problem, but you can't backlight. You also can't show moving pictures, but that's a different topic.

My favorite ebook reader of all time was the Compaq Aero 1550 Pocket PC. Great display. Alas, everyone wanted color, so that technology died out.

Regards,
Jack Tingle