CSS mess

[latepaul]

As to the question of automating the process. That would certainly reduce the marginal cost making it more of an incentive but there's the cost of setting up the automation itself.

For me it all comes back to this - those of you who consider it "lazy" or wrong for a publisher to produce an ebook which has excess code internally, would you pay more for a "cleaner" version?

[theducks]

It costs more to store the book. (It might be a fraction of a cent, but it is MORE)

Does it costs more to apply DRM? (byte count charge)

It uses more bandwidth to transmit (those buckets of bytes, still cost and slow other tasks)

So far, these all affect the supplier.

there are expenses that the Reseller and Customer incur from needless bloat

Just because the workman can't be bothered to clean up after the project.

[latepaul]

Originally Posted by theducks

It costs more to store the book. (It might be a fraction of a cent, but it is MORE)

Does it costs more to apply DRM? (byte count charge)

It uses more bandwidth to transmit (those buckets of bytes, still cost and slow other tasks)

So far, these all affect the supplier.

I'm not so sure that's true. Increasing the size of all your ebooks only costs you extra if it pushes over the edge of your current storage. You can store half a million books on a 1Tb drive. So it's the 500,001st ebook that forces you to buy a new drive and costs you money.

But these numbers are so large that you'll be replacing the drives due to age long before you actually fill them due to your ebook catalog.

But let's say it is a real cost. It still has to be more than the cost of doing the job to slim down those ebooks.

there are expenses that the Reseller and Customer incur from needless bloat

Just because the workman can't be bothered to clean up after the project.

I don't believe it's "just because the workman" anything. I believe it's because the person paying the workman doesn't care enough to get them to do it. And they don't care because people don't buy ebooks based on how little unnecessary CSS they contain.

It's really not about some individual slovenly person who's deciding they don't want to do a good job. Even if that were true, the reason that person isn't fired and replaced with someone better is that there isn't enough incentive. The cost isn't significant enough to try to cut it, the enhanced product won't command a higher price. Why should they care?

[Gardenman]

Originally Posted by latepaul

I don't call it lazy because you're talking about a company, an organisation that exists to make money. There may be lazy people working for that company but that's not the same thing.

Choosing not to do something because you can't see how it will make more money, is not, for a company, "lazy", it's doing what they do.

It's the same reason I'm always surprised when people call companies "greedy" as if there's an acceptable level of profit at which they should stop trying.



Why "should" though? Are they being paid to write the smallest code possible? If so then "should" applies, if their employers have other priorities then perhaps not.

And yes things change. We do things now we would never have dreamt of in the days of slower CPUs, smaller memory, less storage and restricted bandwidth. And that is entirely appropriate.

Lest we forget the Y2K "bug" was really a space saving optimisation that lasted longer than it should have.



Which was my point. It's more efficient for the creator and the OP was asking why the creator did it. The only reason the creator should care about inefficiency on the reader's side is if it hurts their ability to sell it. Which I doubt it does.

Does the reader even care?

[theducks]

Originally Posted by Gardenman

Does the reader even care?

Yes!
Even if they do not know why they can fit 1001 clean books or only 1000 messy (ya thought I would say 'dirty' ) Books on their device.
1000+ line CSS on a novel is absurd

[Cinisajoy]

Originally Posted by theducks

Yes!
Even if they do not know why they can fit 1001 clean books or only 1000 messy (ya thought I would say 'dirty' ) Books on their device.
1000+ line CSS on a novel is absurd

How would the average reader even know it was a dirty book?

[theducks]

Originally Posted by Cinisajoy

How would the average reader even know it was a dirty book?

It was published by the Big 5 ?

[Cinisajoy]

Originally Posted by theducks

It was published by the Big 5 ?

Oh so most readers would be accepting because the Big 5 knows what is best for readers.

Or in other words wouldn't give the way it is put together a second thought because they want to read that specific book on their specific device.

I had guessed the answer but wanted to be sure.

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by Cinisajoy

How would the average reader even know it was a dirty book?

The covers usually give them away

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by DNSB

I do fairly regular updates (additions, deletions and amendations) to my "house stylesheet". If/When I go back and re-edit an epub, I replace the existing stylesheet with the latest update as part of my workflow.

OTOH, I would be very surprised if many publishers go back and edit their older ebooks on a regular basis. I've complained about spelling errors, chunks of paragraphs missing or inserted twice, weird styling -- who starts a chapter with a half line that uses a text size half the size of the rest of the paragraph?, images that use pixel sizing so any screen larger than 600x800 gives mini-images. So far I've found few publishers that actually pay attention and respond.

Hmmmm... interesting the [size=+2] bb code[/size] does not seem to work.

I've seen many eBooks updated and that includes the CSS. The CSS is still full of unused classes. I've used Calibre's editor to compare different versions and where they have not changed the filenames, I've seen errors fixed and sometimes graphics replaced with better compressed versions and/or higher resolution. The problem is that when we buy an eBook from one of the big publishers, we don't get notified that there has been an update. So we don't know and don't go trying to get it.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Cinisajoy

How would the average reader even know it was a dirty book?

They won't know what's wrong, but they will know something is wrong. I've read a lot about Kindles having issues indexing and I've read of old Sony Readers (505 for example) having issues with some eBooks. I think these problems are due to the excess in the CSS. I recently cleaned an eBook and there were about 120 (roughly) classes deleted. Yes, more modern Readers with more working memory and a newer processor may handle these no bother, but for people using older Readers, that many not always be so.