PDF is not an eBook format

[ahi]

Originally Posted by Kostas

Wait, does liking books gives us the right to have an opinion on how we want them to look?
Or should we leave this to "typography experts"?
I suddenly feel guilty for my ignorance.
And I do think that pdfs are perfect on my computer but want anything else but pdf on my handheld device.
Am I as a consumer-reader on the topic though I have not the slightest idea about typography technicalities?
Well, my ignorant's 2 cents guess is that in 2 years from now pdf will be an exception on mobile reading devices.
Just because there are hords of ignorants like me who very subjectively find that pdfs are not satisfactory on a small screen.

God have mercy on our souls the day we start to entrust any part of our existence to people specially knowledgable and/or trained to deal/work with said part.

It's COMMUNISM, I say!

- Ahi

Ps.: Take back our world: build your own house, bake your own bread, and sew your own clothes! It's the only way to avoid the oppression of the elitist bastards!

[LDBoblo]

Originally Posted by ahi

God have mercy on our souls the day we start to entrust any part of our existence to people specially knowledgable and/or trained to deal/work with said part.

It's COMMUNISM, I say!

- Ahi

Ps.: Take back our world: build your own house, bake your own bread, and sew your own clothes! It's the only way to avoid the oppression of the elitist bastards!

Internet communism is a bourgeois concept. We must have this thread closed before the true revolution can commence.

[Ankh]

Originally Posted by ahi

It's COMMUNISM, I say!

No, it is a "dollar shop syndrome" society. Statistically speaking, quality is not recognized nor is the general population ready to pay for it.

By and large, people want cheap, not perfectly typeset books.

[EowynCarter]

Originally Posted by Ankh

No, it is a "dollar shop syndrome" society. Statistically speaking, quality is not recognized nor is the general population ready to pay for it.

By and large, people want cheap, not perfectly typeset books.

Not true. I want qualitty for my e-book. In term of properly edited and proofread. I don't care about typos rules, as i don't know them. As long as it feels nice to read, i'm ok with it.

[LDBoblo]

Originally Posted by Ankh

No, it is a "dollar shop syndrome" society. Statistically speaking, quality is not recognized nor is the general population ready to pay for it.

By and large, people want cheap, not perfectly typeset books.

Hey, I'll live with that if they ever become cheap from the big producers. I'm not interested much in paying typeset-and-printed-and-bound prices for books that are devoid of skill and tangibility.

I'm going to have to live off free and indie stuff for my ebook diet given the quality available. I can always reformat those, as long as it's a format I can pull the text from. I'll be happy to pay book prices for good ebooks when they actually become good.

[ahi]

Originally Posted by LDBoblo

Internet communism is a bourgeois conceit. We must have this thread closed before the true revolution can commence.

Oh, of course... it's all quite ludicrous.

The whole reason for this thread's existence seems to be the delusion that anybody (even if they have never once written, typed, or pronounced the word "typography" before) knows more about bookmaking than professionals of the field.

That or the notion that eBooks are somehow a radically different medium--which they are not. They are a slightly different medium that can no more ignore the page paradigm than paper books. Their radical differences in the present day are entirely due to the fact that both the market and the technology are not worth a 10th of what the price tags show.

Of course, people who shop at Walmart and pay Prada prices do become fanatically committed to evangelizing Walmart's quality and deriding all alternatives, whether better or worse... but especially those that are better. Without doing so, the hundreds of dollars spent on inferior goods would start to become harder and harder to justify with a straight face.

Originally Posted by Ankh

No, it is a "dollar shop syndrome" society. Statistically speaking, quality is not recognized nor is the general population ready to pay for it.

By and large, people want cheap, not perfectly typeset books.

A properly typeset book is not a luxury good. It's what you can pick-up from the bloody pharmacy on the corner for $10. (Less than $4 of which ever makes it back to the publisher, about $1 or less of which goes to the author.)

The proper comparison for improperly typeset books is a high-school book report. If you think multi-million dollar corporations should be selling you goods with basically no distribution cost at paperback-like prices that your high-school aged nephew could just as easily have made... that's not being thrifty... that's begging for abuse by corporations.

- Ahi

[ahi]

Originally Posted by EowynCarter

Not true. I want qualitty for my e-book. In term of properly edited and proofread. I don't care about typos rules, as i don't know them. As long as it feels nice to read, i'm ok with it.

THIS is what typography IS. Thank you, EowynCarter!

A book that has been professionally prepared, feels nice to read. A book that hasn't, doesn't... unless you spent over $300 to read it, and you are too emotionally invested to admit that it looks like crap... or so I am forced to assume based on the legions proudly declaring that they can't tell the difference between a well-made book and a poorly-made one.

- Ahi

[EowynCarter]

Originally Posted by ahi

THIS is what typography IS. Thank you, EowynCarter!

A book that has been professionally prepared, feels nice to read. A book that hasn't, doesn't... unless you spent over $300 to read it, and you are too emotionally invested to admit that it looks like crap... or so I am forced to assume based on the legions proudly declaring that they can't tell the difference between a well-made book and a poorly-made one.

- Ahi

Fact is, we can tell the diffrence, up to a certain point. ePub, when PROPERLY used, already allows for nice to read book. (I'm speaking there of book containing mainly text). You're blaming on ePub what's the publisher's fault.

E-reader are not paper book. So does the typos rules needs to be as strict, or even the same ? Maybe not.

[Kostas]

Originally Posted by ahi

God have mercy on our souls the day we start to entrust any part of our existence to people specially knowledgable and/or trained to deal/work with said part.

It's COMMUNISM, I say!

- Ahi

Ps.: Take back our world: build your own house, bake your own bread, and sew your own clothes! It's the only way to avoid the oppression of the elitist bastards!

Hey, I'm deeply aware of my ignorance.
I don't want to build my house. Experts will do it. But I want to choose the color of the walls if you don't mind.
I don't want to bake my bread but I prefer french ficelle, even if a bunch of experts have established that baguette is better.
...
And I don't want to have to reconvert pdfs to another format because they look awfull on my 6" screen, I prefer to have experts do this job for me.
So simple...

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by ahi

THIS is what typography IS. Thank you, EowynCarter!

A book that has been professionally prepared, feels nice to read. A book that hasn't, doesn't...

I beg to differ.
I read ebooks for over two years on a Sony Clie, for which I paid $40 used. I read in PalmDOC and eReader formats--no kerning, no serifs, no hyphenation, screen that holds 35-40 characters, not justified, with a backlight.

I was ecstatic with it. I read it constantly--on the train, in the elevator, waiting in line for lunch, on hold on banking phone calls. I upgraded because I was very tired of running out of battery in mid-book, because the device just won't allow 5 hours/day of reading time.

I love good typography... but it's not crucially important for me to enjoy a book. "Not-atrocious typography" is; I don't read blogs that are pink-text-on-grey-backgrounds, with scripty font headers and tables that force the text to almost the full screen width. I don't read blogs with serif fonts. I don't read books with type that's too small and cramped, or that's so wide-spaced I feel like I'm floating when I look at it.

But I, like most people, have a wide range of acceptable typography. There's a reason that there's not one typographical standard for all printed materials, that newspapers are multi-column but even hardcover novels are single-column, that journals are 6x9 while paperbacks are 4.25x7. The layout is shifted to fit the content and printing requirements, and the readers will accept different layouts.

Newspapers are carefully formatted with design software, because the narrow columns have huge spaces between longer words otherwise. News websites aren't built with this setup--because HTML sucks at columns, and because it's not necessary; the "space" available on a screen is very different from the space available on a cheaply printed large page.

A growing number of commercial PDF ebooks are produced straight from word processing software, with none of the precise formatting abilities activated.

PDF *can* show excellent typography. It can do so in a way that's not likely to be matched by any other format. (I suspect it's possible to do so with ePub, but would be much more difficult.) However, current commercial PDFs are *not* built to that level of precision... and we've seen nothing from publishers that says they're likely to be in the future.

The best layout for e-ink screens hasn't yet been discovered. We don't know if it, or close enough to it for most people, is create-able with ePub, a good eReader renderer, or Mobi, in addition to PDF.

legions proudly declaring that they can't tell the difference between a well-made book and a poorly-made one.

I can tell. I mostly don't care.

I can tell the difference between an excellent meal, with carefully blended spices and beautiful arrangement on the plate, with just the right balance between tangy and smooth flavors, the right balance between crisp vegetables and soft breads and rich meats. And I can enjoy that.

And I *still* can enjoy a cheap burger in a paper wrapper, eaten in a walking crowd on a busy street. I can tell myself, "this is overcooked, and there's not enough mayo, and the lettuce is wilted"--and eat there again tomorrow.

Everyone notices *bad* typography. Not everyone cares about mediocre typography.

[DawnFalcon]

Originally Posted by ahi

God have mercy on our souls the day we start to entrust any part of our existence to people specially knowledgable and/or trained to deal/work with said part.

Yes, congratulations, you know how to make print books. What that isn't is the last word in ebooks, where you're evidently a rank amature.

[ahi]

Originally Posted by EowynCarter

Fact is, we can tell the diffrence, up to a certain point. ePub, when PROPERLY used, already allows for nice to read book. (I'm speaking there of book containing mainly text). You're blaming on ePub what's the publisher's fault.

E-reader are not paper book. So does the typos rules needs to be as strict, or even the same ? Maybe not.

If you are asking, EowynCarter, whether the rules of typography apply to eBooks the same way, the answer is no. I'm not sure I would put it in terms of "as strict" though, as some of the difference are due more to the size of the available reading area than anything else.

Some obvious stuff:

No need for blank pages in eBooks. In paper books they are mostly used as separators, and, more often than not, occur only on one page of the two seen at any given time.

No need for half title pages (the first page of most paper books is a title page with only the author and the title, followed by a more full title page with publisher and possibly other information)--unnecessary repetition that is annoying and nothing else due to inability to skip it as quickly as one can with a paper book.

Widows and orphans are very difficult to avoid with a small viewing area and a (more or less) regular size font. There simply are not enough characters to creatively shift and juggle in order to adjust where pages begin and end. However not all widows and orphans are created equal... a single word spilling over to the next page is worse than an almost full line spilling over to the next page... and there's probably nothing worse than the signature line of a quoted letter being separated from the text of the letter by a page-break.

Of course, this latter item will cease to be an issue once eBook reader's standardize on a screen-size of between 8" - 10", and they will... if they are not forever to remain pulp-fiction and public domain fiction reading devices.

The other reason I would avoid suggesting, EowynCarter, that less strict rules for eBooks are necessary or even reasonably is the fact that decently typesetting an eBook takes less time than any other part of the publishing processing (seeing as how they already did the typesetting once, possibly for a page size not too much bigger than the screen-size of the targeted eBook reader) and the benefits are limited only by the number of copies purchased or distributed.

Publishers spend thousands of dollars on preparing and marketing even some fairly shitty books that, in retrospect, one wonders why they ever expected to be able to sell. Why assume they couldn't (if they cared to) pay another $100 - $200 to a LaTeX jockey to rejig their book to the prevalent eBook reading device screen sizes? (Down the road PDFs multiple sizes and multiple fonts could be contained in a single file.) Surely this neither takes longer nor costs more than it does for them to do the monkeying around to make an ePub.

Originally Posted by Kostas

Hey, I'm deeply aware of my ignorance.
I don't want to build my house. Experts will do it. But I want to choose the color of the walls if you don't mind.
I don't want to bake my bread but I prefer french ficelle, even if a bunch of experts have established that baguette is better.
...
And I don't want to have to reconvert pdfs to another format because they look awfull on my 6" screen, I prefer to have experts do this job for me.
So simple...

I dub you the King of very excellent analogies.

- Ahi

[ahi]

Originally Posted by DawnFalcon

Yes, congratulations, you know how to make print books. What that isn't is the last word in ebooks, where you're evidently a rank amature.

Do go on and explain this line of thinking...

... in the meantime I'll go check if my single gratis multi-format eBook offering has passed the 25,000 download mark within the last 6 months.

- Ahi

[ahi]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

Everyone notices *bad* typography. Not everyone cares about mediocre typography.

We are in close enough agreement that I do not feel the need to argue. Though I do not agree with your assumption that eBooks are somehow oh so different from paperbooks.

They are just smaller and page turns are more onerous. Avoiding bookmaking practices that aggravate those problems is all that's required in my mind.

A small adjustment--not a complete from-the-ground-up rethinking.

- Ahi

[DawnFalcon]

Heh. I've had articles on websites pass 1 million uniques. Quite a few of them.

Simply because you have a single, not-very-popular book out there dosn't translate in any way to your ability to give ebook readers the layouts they're looking for.