Giving epub a 2nd chance

[6charlong]

This thread got me curious. In my view the formatting of a book is an art with four essential elements: the formatting must ease the reader’s understanding; it must peek and capture the reader’s interest; it must be beautiful in the sense of elegant, and the formatting must remain largely hidden from the reader’s consciousness. To do all this takes much skill.

In my current reading John Maddox Roberts’ Oracle of the Dead, a mystery story set in the ancient Roman Empire at the time of Julius Caesar, meets most of these criteria. I compared it with The Temple of the Muses, an earlier book in the series from the same publisher, to see how the art may have improved. Both books are in ePub and both are pretty well formatted. I loaded them on a 6-inch Sony PRS505 and a 5-inch Astak Pocket Pro: the two companies use different implementations of Adobe ePub.

The earlier book is less sophisticated. It looks as if it was designed for the old, small screen PDAs. It uses ragged right on both Sony and Astak implementations and the (artful) use of bolding and capitals to tweak a reader’s interest. These features were about all a designer had with older formats such as eReader. Those limitations keep emerging: it uses both blanks between paragraphs and indented first lines in paragraphs. Still, the Table of Contents has hyperlinks to chapters and the chapters have links back to the TOC and the leading between lines works. Another artifact of its eReader roots shows in the chapter heads which all start on the top line of each new page which was hard to avoid in the eReader format.

“Oracle,” the newer book, also shows signs of having been intentionally designed by an artist but it appears to have been designed from scratch for the richer ePub environment. The designer uses all the techniques of the older book plus drop caps and small caps. Gone are the blanks between paragraphs and there are no hyperlinks back to the TOC in either implementation. The book is fully justified on the newer Astak ePub but all four margins are the same width on both the 6- and 5-inch screens which works on the Sony but feels like a needless waste of space on the smaller one.

Where else but the blogosphere would you find a critique of eBook formats? But my point is that even with two well formatted ePub books there is still room for improvement. My other point is that most publishers aren’t putting as much effort into format ePub as they did with BBeB. Credit is due to Thomas Dunne Books and St Martin’s Press, at least for these two. Credit is due Heidi Ericksen who designed “Temple.” We don’t often k know who makes our books; they only list who writes them. I think it’s good that book designers get credit as well as (gently) offered and, I hope, gently received, criticism for their work. I think we need to encourage better achievement in eBook design.