Publishing practices that drive me crazy

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

Yes. Because, of course, you're entirely representative of the expectations of "most". Talk about a non sequitur.

But in this case he is right.

You can argue about whether ebooks need to reproduce the look of paper books. But back in the heydays of e-ink readers, one of the selling points was that it looks like an actual book. Including indents, no paragraph space, justified, hyphenated, and a serif font.

That is still the case. As evidence, look at any publicity photo from any of the popular ereader makers.

[4691mls]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

The majority of pBooks I've read have indents, no paragraph space, justified, hyphenated, and a serif font. So that's the sort of look most are expecting.

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

Yes. Because, of course, you're entirely representative of the expectations of "most". Talk about a non sequitur.

I've gotta agree with JSWolf on this one - if people are used to print books, those are the standards they are used to.

That said, I'm not as picky as some people here. The presence or lack of paragraph indents doesn't really bother me one way or the other as long as the space between paragraphs isn't huge. My ereaders let me decide between serif or sans serif or if I want the text justified.

The only thing on his list that I've run into trouble with on ereaders is incorrect hyphenation (words are sometimes broken at the wrong place, not between syllables as is the norm in print books).

As to the capitalization of the first few words discussed earlier in the thread, this only annoys me if it was done wrong so that the first letter of each word is smaller, or if the whole words are smaller than the rest of the text.

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

But in this case he is right.

You can argue about whether ebooks need to reproduce the look of paper books. But back in the heydays of e-ink readers, one of the selling points was that it looks like an actual book. Including indents, no paragraph space, justified, hyphenated, and a serif font.

That is still the case. As evidence, look at any publicity photo from any of the popular ereader makers.

Jon said all that?!

No, he's not right. Jon thinks that because he can't recall any print books that commit the egregious "errors" that he sees in some ebooks, that they didn't occur in print books. He's wrong about that.

He also thinks that he represent "most" people when it comes to how ebook typography should appear. Even if true (and I don't for a minute think its is), his giant non-sequitur is still a giant non-sequitur.

"The majority of print books I've read did things like X. Ergo... most people expect to see the same look I do."

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

You can argue about whether ebooks need to reproduce the look of paper books.

I have no interest in the topic of whether or ebooks need to reproduce the look of paper books. None.

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

But back in the heydays of e-ink readers, one of the selling points was that it looks like an actual book. Including indents, no paragraph space, justified, hyphenated, and a serif font.

Again... there never was a time when all actual books conformed to any "indents, no paragraph space, justified, hyphenated, and a serif font" standard (regardless of whatever eink heyday sales pitch they might have fallen for). That is my point.

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

Again... there never was a time when all actual books...

Which would be why nobody is saying 'all' except you.

The wording was 'majority' and 'most':

Originally Posted by JSWolf

The majority of pBooks I've read have indents, no paragraph space, justified, hyphenated, and a serif font. So that's the sort of look most are expecting.

That does seem to be so. Again, as evidence I would submit publicity photos used to sell ereaders to the general public over the last decade.

[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

Lots of little things bug me and I do edit my books..

Anyway, to add one thing in particular that seems extra stupid: setting the body text to font size: small. What lunatic is in charge of formatting? I've seen this in books from the Big Six (Big Five? whatever).

Specifying anything about about body text is stupid lunacy, but I agree that your example is extra stupid lunacy.

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

Which would be why nobody is saying 'all' except you.

The wording was 'majority' and 'most':

Fine. My point still holds with "majority" or "most"

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

That does seem to be so. Again, as evidence I would submit publicity photos used to sell ereaders to the general public over the last decade.

I have no idea what you're trying to say here. Your evidence that most pbooks were formatted the way that you and Jon describe as "standard" is publicity photos used to sell ereaders? Weird, but you do you.

My evidence that "a majority" of ebooks might not have been formatted the way that you and Jon describe as "standard" is the fact that I can (and often do) easily pull pbooks from many peoples' collections that defy the unicorn pbook standard you both describe.

And again... Jon's "evidence" was "because I've not seen it in pbooks, most people X". Hardly convincing. Definitely not defendable.

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

I have no idea what you're trying to say here. Your evidence that most pbooks were formatted the way that you and Jon describe as "standard" is publicity photos used to sell ereaders? Weird, but you do you.

And again... Jon's "evidence" was "because I've not seen it in pbooks, most people X". Hardly convincing. Definitely not defendable.

Publicity photos are designed to make a product look as appealing as possible to the majority of potential customers. If you look at any photo produced by a company that is attempting to sell the concept of 'use our gadget to read books on a screen', whether it be Kindle, Kobo, Pocketbook, Barnes and Noble or the iPad, it will show a device displaying text in the way Jon described: indents, no paragraph space, justified, hyphenated, and a serif font

They do that because that is the sort of look that tells the majority of people 'this is a book we're displaying.'

My evidence that "a majority" of ebooks might not have been formatted the way that you and Jon describe as "standard" is the fact that I can (and often do) easily pull pbooks from many peoples' collections that defy the unicorn pbook standard you both describe.

Anecdotal evidence is fun to talk about. But doesn't really prove any point.

Honestly, I suspect you are being purposely obtuse so that you can have something to argue about.

[DyckBook]

Well here's another editing faux-pas that drives me crazy. Adding 's to the end of a word that already ends in s. For example Collins's book should be Collins' book. At what point am I no longer just correcting minor editing missteps for legibility and peace of mind; and am now trying to hold back a tidal wave of global ignorance?

[Barty]

A bit of typographic flair on decorative text doesn't bother me. What I do not appreciate is when somebody decides to set body text to, say 0.8em. What the heck? I have my font size set to how I like it, what business do you have to change it? This isn't print when font size needs to be a certain size to keep page count at certain limit.

Likewise, don't mess with margins of the main text, or line spacing. Don't embed a font unless you have a really good reason, like matching typeface of a beloved book edition. Use css like a human being, avoid inline style.

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

Anecdotal evidence is fun to talk about. But doesn't really prove any point.

Exactly. Except that Jon's pointless anecdotal evidence that I was addressing (and that you so oddly jumped in to defend) wasn't even fun.

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

Honestly, I suspect you are being purposely obtuse so that you can have something to argue about.

That's exactly how your tangential argument feels to me. Weird, that.

[retiredbiker]

For the past year or so I've been OCRing old pulp magazines and old books from Internet Archive, to make epubs I can read. They somewhere contain just about every style feature mentioned above, and change over the years, across publishers, and even within publishers across issues. Nope, no standards.

As for a gripe about dumb things: in magazines, how about scene breaks where there is no reason for them in the text? Just to have one or two on every page?

But the magic of ebooks is I can make these old texts into readable books. My style, for my old poor eyes: really, really simple. Most of you would probably hate my style, but wait until you get old enough. This magic is keeping my brain young.

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by retiredbiker

For the past year or so I've been OCRing old pulp magazines and old books from Internet Archive, to make epubs I can read.

What do you use to convert?

I've converted a few PDFs using Sigil and copy/paste. It works, but it is laborious.

[Pulpmeister]

I just picked up the first hardback I could reach behind me, Rolls, Man of Speed, Bodley Head, 1953. Each chapter starts with a drop cap, and the first word is all capitalised.

The Galloway Case, The Crime Club, (Collins), 1958: First two words in all capitals.

Murder Every Monday, Penguin, 1956: First two words.

Shoot if you Must, Hodder paperback, 1954: First word, using small caps font.

The Trouble at Pinelands, by Ernest M Poate, New York, 1922: entire first line of type in caps, plus the added glory of a drop cap!

Tales of Terror, by Dick Donovan, London, 1899: First word in caps.

I thought it was common practice.

[retiredbiker]

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

What do you use to convert?

I've converted a few PDFs using Sigil and copy/paste. It works, but it is laborious.

The OCR Internet Archive uses is so bad, it is easier to do it myself rather than try and correct any of their text formats, especially magazines. Even scraping the text off a pdf is really full of errors. . So I start with one of the cbr or cbz files. If only a pdf is available, I will use pdfimages to get the images out and use those.

For the OCR, I use tesseract with a GUI front end called OCRFeeder (on Linux). On each page I select the text I want and then recognise it. This lets me do multi-column magazines, avoid advertisements, deal with "continued on page 161", and so on. I copy each column of text into LO Writer. It's pretty fast, for a two-column magazine page I average about 50 seconds for the select-recognise-copy-paste part. At the end I convert the odt file from Writer to epub using Calibre, and touch it up in the editor.

OCRFeeder does a great job of finding correct paragraphs, dealing with end-of-line hyphens, and so on, so there is very little detail formatting needed. I've a handful of saved styles in Writer for chapter headings, notes or letters or signs in the text, poetry and so on.

Of course there are scannos--proofreading the result is the most time-consuming part of the work, by far. The clarity of the original print job, and the image, determine how many errors you get. A really, really clear image of excellent printing might give 1 or 2 errors per page, but if the print is very blurry and there are lots of dirty marks, it could be 100 per page. So some source files I'll look at, and say "no thanks" on that one.

Labour intensive, yes, but it's a hobby. I might spend 4 or 5 days on an issue of something like Dime Detective, with maybe 8 stories, 75,000 words and 12 illustrations.

[DyckBook]

Originally Posted by Pulpmeister

Tales of Terror, by Dick Donovan, London, 1899: First word in caps.

Well that answer my question of when did this start?