Kindle, You Could Have Been Even Greater

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

Either you're reading the wrong ebooks, or your definitions of "most" and/or "poor" are wildly different than mine. I can't remember the last ebook I read where the formatting even crossed my mind.

Some of my objections to formatting on ebooks are personal preferences and some are just bad decisions on the publisher/formatter's part. Thankfully that last group is getting smaller as most ebooks now have fairly decent formatting. I haven't run into an ebook that is double spaced in close to a year for example. OTOH, ebooks with dropcaps that cause issues when reading with a large font size are still relatively common especially when you have a wide character as the character that is rendered as a drop cap.

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

I've disliked the default formatting of nearly every ebook I've ever read. So I guess our definitions are, in fact, wildly different. Why is that surprising? People's definitions of "poor" are wildly different in almost everything - books, movies, music, food, weather, you name it...

I don't think our definitions are that different at all. You said you've "disliked the formatting" of nearly every ebook you've read. You didn't say the formatting was poor, or suggest that things were "wrong". It doesn't surprise me at all that people have different formatting preferences (or degrees which formatting affect their reading experience). Human's are human. I was taking issue with Jon's penchant for calling most ebook formatting objectively "poor," or "wrong, " when what he actually means is a much more subjective "not to his liking."

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

Correction: you could give me long list things that tend to conflict with your own exacting personal preferences. I find nothing inherently wrong with that, but that is vastly different from what I would call "wrong with the formatting." It would be nice to hear you own up to the fact that there's a difference between "poorly formatted" and "not the way I prefer it to look." Even just once.

Poorly formatted if the correct term.

• Large line height (worse then a Kindle)
• Large chapter header which takes way too much space
• Windows and orphans set to 2
• Left justified
• Different font sizes in the main text they they should be the same size
• Main font sizes set smaller then 1em
• Wide l/r margins
• Sometimes a numbered list is not aligned correctly
• Generic cover (thankfully that's mostly gone away)
• Cover too small so it looks fuzzy full screen
• Paragraph indents too large or too small
• Paragraph spaces and sometimes large enough to be a section break
• Section breaks that are too small (one line), too large, or use blanks space (which can get lost if the break is at the end or beginning of a page)
• Drop caps that don't look good with my choice of font and line height
• Large first letter that leaves the first line with a different line height then the rest of the paragraph
• A really poor synopsis in the OPF that has review just and they usually are not complete
• Embedded fonts that don't look good on eInk and fonts I don't want (Adobe Garamond is not good)
• Offset text that has a font size that's too small or it's not correctly offset
• Graphics used for accented characters
• Chapter headers linked back to the HTML ToC
• Copyright at the end (or neat the end) instead of after the title page
• font family is specified in CSS that is not embedded
• Widows and orphans not turned off
• Using graphics for some text

I cannot say for sure if the list is complete. Probably not.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by DNSB

Some of my objections to formatting on ebooks are personal preferences and some are just bad decisions on the publisher/formatter's part. Thankfully that last group is getting smaller as most ebooks now have fairly decent formatting. I haven't run into an ebook that is double spaced in close to a year for example. OTOH, ebooks with dropcaps that cause issues when reading with a large font size are still relatively common especially when you have a wide character as the character that is rendered as a drop cap.

In most cases, a dropcap will cause search not to work for that word.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

I don't think our definitions are that different at all. You said you've "disliked the formatting" of nearly every ebook you've read. You didn't say the formatting was poor, or suggest that things were "wrong". It doesn't surprise me at all that people have different formatting preferences (or degrees which formatting affect their reading experience). Human's are human. I was taking issue with Jon's penchant for calling most ebook formatting objectively "poor," or "wrong, " when what he actually means is a much more subjective "not to his liking."

Sometimes it is poor and sometimes it is wrong, Poor is subjective. Wrong is not.

[DiapDealer]

You sure showed me.

[cellaris]

Well, I like Kindles and drop caps... Very unorthodox.

[Desertway]

Somehow I managed to read for nearly the first five decades of my life without knowing what a "font" was. The only margins that bothered me were the too tight paperbacks that needed a cracked spine to read the interior. Line spacing never came up.

It's not that my old eyes don't appreciate the options I have now, but it's hard for me to consider these things as essential to a good reading experience.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by Desertway

Somehow I managed to read for nearly the first five decades of my life without knowing what a "font" was. The only margins that bothered me were the too tight paperbacks that needed a cracked spine to read the interior. Line spacing never came up.

It's not that my old eyes don't appreciate the options I have now, but it's hard for me to consider these things as essential to a good reading experience.

Most of us managed to read paper books without knowing what a font was or thinking about line spacing. But for some those things started to matter when we moved to ebooks; for others they've never mattered. Why? Who knows? There's no accounting for taste.

For me font/margins/line spacing are certainly essential to my reading experience, and I too grew up with paper books. So that's not the reason.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by Desertway

Somehow I managed to read for nearly the first five decades of my life without knowing what a "font" was. The only margins that bothered me were the too tight paperbacks that needed a cracked spine to read the interior. Line spacing never came up.

For me, I was around 16 when I got involved with the university student newspaper as a photographer. At that time, the body text was printed at a local printshop using Linotype hot metal machines and the final layout done using wax pasteup to produce the final camera ready copy ready for platemaking. I got interested in the whole process and learned enough that I was hired for one summer. More years ago than I care to remember but I developed a love for typography that has lasted ever since. I did find myself criticizing quite a few books for their layout, choice of fonts, etc. After all, IMNSHO, I could and had done better. Cheaper and faster? Likely not. I still have my Linotype pica pole (line gauge) though I haven't made much use of it for decades other than as a back scratcher.

For me, ebooks offer that chance to modify books to make them resemble my idea of what a book should look like for maximum readability and minimum distraction. What several of my friends have called a very boring page style with the minimum of frills and flourishes.

[Desertway]

Originally Posted by DNSB

For me, I was around 16 when I got involved with the university student newspaper as a photographer. At that time, the body text was printed at a local printshop using Linotype hot metal machines and the final layout done using wax pasteup to produce the final camera ready copy ready for platemaking. I got interested in the whole process and learned enough that I was hired for one summer. More years ago than I care to remember but I developed a love for typography that has lasted ever since. I did find myself criticizing quite a few books for their layout, choice of fonts, etc. After all, IMNSHO, I could and had done better. Cheaper and faster? Likely not. I still have my Linotype pica pole (line gauge) though I haven't made much use of it for decades other than as a back scratcher.

For me, ebooks offer that chance to modify books to make them resemble my idea of what a book should look like for maximum readability and minimum distraction. What several of my friends have called a very boring page style with the minimum of frills and flourishes.

I can see how this sort of experience would have an impact on your relationship with the printed or displayed page. We all come to it differently. Like my daughter who absolutely cannot enjoy reading on any screen at all, including eInk. My own demands are few and simple and handled just fine by Kindle in nearly all cases. But, I suppose I should have said, "that's just me". I'm at a point in life when I've become very tired of fussing over details, especially tech details. I don't even deDRM anymore, though I did for a good 10 years. I do, however, send all my books to my K3, "just in case", and will continue to do so.until May 20, at which point I won't worry about it anymore.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by mjfriedman

I dropped some thoughts on the development of the Kindle platform at https://michaeljayfriedman.substack....n-even-greater. Kindle remains an excellent platform for reading eBooks, but the original vision was for a personal text repository....

I replaced your shortened URL with the actual URL. Please don't use URL shortening services in posts on MobileRead. Thanks.

[jackm8]

Originally Posted by mjfriedman

I dropped some thoughts on the development of the Kindle platform at https://michaeljayfriedman.substack....n-even-greater. Kindle remains an excellent platform for reading eBooks, but the original vision was for a personal text repository....

Why not just copy/paste at least parts of contents of your thoughts to this forum?

[JSWolf]

The Kindle could have been greater with better firmware and nothing at all to do with Amazon.

[Josieb1]

For me, it’s the quality of the e-readers that they are producing. I recently returned the Colorsoft scribe because it had an uneven cream screen. I had to buy my 12th generation paperwhite off eBay to get a reasonably white screen as they sent me three piss yellow screens. And I don’t mean cream screens I mean yellow screens. I recently bought a secondhand voyage and a secondhand oasis three and I’ve forgotten how good those screens were. I should never have sold mine. Kobo just produced better e-readers. I don’t have a problem with the software the Kindle’s use, apart from the DRM issue, it’s just the e-readers.