the need for a new e-book format

[drjenkins]

Originally Posted by tuskin

New standard?
Well, perhaps not.

xkcd: Standards
http://xkcd.com/927/

-drjenkins

[Hellmark]

Originally Posted by drjenkins

xkcd: Standards
http://xkcd.com/927/

-drjenkins

Uhm, what was the point of linking to something, that was linked to in what you quoted?

[charleski]

Originally Posted by petrucci

I am in the process of creating my first e-book. I was shocked to find that behind the curtain of many e-book formats there is nothing more than html. I personally feel that html is a very poor choice. It does not give the typesetter enough control of the placement of type on the page. Symbols are also difficult to use. To obtain the result I desire I will end up creating the book from jpeg images.

The sad thing is that the problem of digital typesetting was all but solved more than thirty years ago by Donald Knuth with his TeX language. I doubt there is a version of TeX for an e-reader, but I thought I would ask.

Creating a book from a sequence of jpegs is the worst possible way of creating it.

If you need precise layout, create a PDF. Obviously, this is a fixed size page and will only work properly on devices that have the right sized screen. If you want to create a book that will scale to different sized screens and will allow changes in font size, then html works very well. Use the right tool for the right purpose.

There's certainly scope for the current html/css standards to be expanded with support for page-relative elements, and the people writing ePub3 missed a huge trick by failing to specify a page model, but TeX is certainly not the answer.

[Lancelot]

For the sake of Thor...do not create epub with pages using jpg/rasterized images. At work, I'm watching some titles being converted to such format and it can be slow to render on screen depending on your device [assuming it's not optimized for your devices]...I can't image anyone wants to pay for this reading experiences and not the actual books for a few bucks more.

Seriously, if you must....there is nothing wrong using pdf...most tablets supports it and resolves a lot of text/design issues. I can't understand why epub is even the rage...screens too small then wait and allow for larger portable screen technology to solve that problem. This rush with epub is creating a lot of badly formatted ebooks. Let's not to forget dropping a lot of useful content when converting from already published books...simply because the limits of epub at this point in time.

Sure, it's a new format and every publishers wants to get a piece of this new revenue...but at the price of not having a vision and true understanding of the technology [devices] driving behind this. Amazon got the early start and watch how much of it's ebook market has lost since the waves of tablets hit the marketplace?

It is not the format or even content that is real driving force behind epub. Consumers and this hording culture of ours...would care less and most don't even understand most epubs are dumb down content or re-purpose stuff from existing materials. Of course, this is not to say end users don't like it...for pure readers, all they need is straight text and in this sense...badly formatted epub works well even for them.

Sorry, I digressed from the topic...

[Shaggy]

Originally Posted by SleepyBob

Sure you do. Just like with printed music books - music printed on 5.5"x8.5" sheets isn't always just shrunk 50% from an 8.5"x11" version. Often as not, if it isn't an exact reprint of a larger format book, you'll want the smaller version to show fewer measures per line on more pages so that the music is still readable. eInk sheet music should take advantage of this even more, letting people choose the staff size, and the resulting trade-off with size and number of pages.

But that layout change was probably done by a human. I'm not sure you would want software to dynamically/arbitrarily change the layout. It's not quite as simple as displaying as many notes as will fit and then inserting a page break. With music, sometimes other considerations come into play. IE, intelligent places to break up the measures based on the musical content, phrasing, etc.

[Giggleton]

What you need is an app for creating ebook apps, If you can't already buy one I suspect you'll be able to shortly.

[WillAdams]

An excellent example of an ebook which examines this is Kevin Klement's work on Bertrand Russell's _Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy_:

http://people.umass.edu/klement/russell-imp.html

Anyone considering this problem space would do well to examine his source files, as well as to compare the experience of reading the nicely formatted .pdfs and the ePub.

A similar comparison is possible between the version of Okakura Kakuzo's _The Book of Tea_ which I formatted using TeX (and which is in the TeX Showcase http://www.tug.org/texshowcase/ ):

http://mysite.verizon.net/william_fr...ebookoftea.pdf

and the ePub version:

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=97542

William