Publishing practices that drive me crazy

[DyckBook]

What's with capitalizing a phrase, not a whole sentence or the first line, but just a phrase at the beginning of a chapter. When did that start? Who started it...and have they been put on trial yet? I'd like to testify that it's affecting my mental health.

[Lynx-lynx]

Any particular publisher doing this, published in a particular country? I haven't come across it, I don't think

I buy mainly through kobo, and the books are all usually in english, as in proper English (not US or whatever english ). Although I occasionally buy a book in french.

[ownedbycats]

I think in typesetting that's called a leading (or lead-in, can't quite recall which). When I see them I always assume it was meant for the printed version - it always feels a bit awkward in eBooks.

I've also seen attempts at drop-caps that didn't quite work so well in the eBook.

Also, notices that the eBook I purchased from Kobo was printed on 100% recycled paper. Yeah.

[Lynx-lynx]

Oh yes, the drop caps, I've copped those in ebooks.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by DyckBook

What's with capitalizing a phrase, not a whole sentence or the first line, but just a phrase at the beginning of a chapter. When did that start? Who started it...and have they been put on trial yet? I'd like to testify that it's affecting my mental health.

Dates from before even etched / engraved plate printing. As do fancy caps and/or a dropped cap. Sometimes the letters after the first letter in the first word use small caps. Small caps are a font face style, not simply the capitals at a smaller size so they don't work on all ereaders either.
All egotistic in printed paper books for over 150 years and slow reading. These form of chapter starts and paragraphs are the more stupid things to copy in eBooks.

In print (and web) you either have a first line indent OR a larger than line space top of paragraph margin. Not usually both. Only the first line indent makes sense on smaller screens (baffles me why the two most common Palm OS ereaders for a PDA do extra top margin rather than an indent).
Occasionally you see ebooks doing first line indent AND extra top margin, which is frowned upon by every major publisher.

We avoid Drop Caps, Illuminated Caps, and small caps in ebooks. We'd only use small caps on paper where that would be in a style guide for an acronym or initials or maybe measurements. Same with fractional spaces.

Regular body would have no paragraph spacing but only a first line indent unless the first paragraph after something centred. Quotes, lyrics, verses etc might have extra paragraph spacing vertically and be having no first line indent but a bigger margin.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

Also, notices that the eBook I purchased from Kobo was printed on 100% recycled paper. Yeah.

You caught some of those also
Obviously they just used the typesetting file, with no attention to details (for the extra $ they charge for e-book over paperback).

How about Indented Centered (titles)?
With Calibre/Sigil I spend less than 5 minutes doing the final polish (I adjust the indents to 1.5-2em if outside that range, standard Line-height for normal body text. and reduce Hi-res spacing on title pages that cause overflow pages (we are talking to you Velum). (I wish the Quality check plugin for Calibre would allow for custom CSS checks )

[DiapDealer]

As for why not whole sentences... I figured that was fairly obvious. Some opening sentences are quite long. It would be silly to continue it beyond a portion of the first sentence.

In the grand scheme of "stupid things they do in ebooks just because that's how it was done in print", this isn't a hill I would choose to die on. This isn't even a hill I would choke on before being given the Heimlich. *shrug*

[Quoth]

None of this is worth dying for.

[DiapDealer]

Not even metaphorically?

My point is why sweat this crap at all? The one thing I hate about ebooks is the new crop of armchair typography-experts/police they seem to have spawned.

[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

As for why not whole sentences... I figured that was fairly obvious. Some opening sentences are quite long. It would be silly to continue it beyond a portion of the first sentence.

Isn't it silly to do it at all?

I was confused by it the first time I noticed it. I assume I had come across them many times and they never registered. My first memory of them is from searching for a previous occurrence of a word and couldn't find it, so I had to page backward staring at each page. When I finally found it, it was buried in the stretch of all caps. I assume there was some internal markup that broke the search.

So, for me, they are annoying because they bring back the memory of the painful searching. (And they also seem mess up X-ray completeness.)

[DiapDealer]

All typographic practices are silly to someone.

The practice being discussed has been around forever in print. A golden age of perfect (let alone consistent) typography never existed in print, and none will ever exist in ebooks, either. We can either pointlessly dwell on it, or we can just read the book (like we did with print). I choose the latter. YMMV.

[JSWolf]

One thing that's come from eBooks is paragraph spaces. Novels in print don't have them. Why do some eBooks?

Trying to duplicate the pBook version is also silly sometimes. It doesn't always work. So why do it if it doesn't work?

[ownedbycats]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Trying to duplicate the pBook version is also silly sometimes. It doesn't always work. So why do it if it doesn't work?

Because it costs extra money and/or time to set it differently for eBook, I suppose. Easier to just re-use the same file.

[Quoth]

It's very little cost. Especially if you do MSS -> ebook, Edit MSS styles & format -> PDF

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

One thing that's come from eBooks is paragraph spaces. Novels in print don't have them. Why do some eBooks?

I think this crept in from web design, where it might make some sense.

But nothing prevents someone from doing a novel in print this way. InDesign doesn’t care how odd it might look.