Basic rules of ePubs

[GERGE]

Note: This ended up being a little rant, sorry about that.

1. Leave glyph size to the reader in the body text.
2. Leave line spacing to the reader in the body text.
3. Leave typeface choice of the body text to the reader.
4. Leave justification settings of the body to the reader too.

Almost every epub I bought was suffering from not following one of these. Self-published books are usually okay but almost no big publisher understands one crucial thing: we are using ebook readers, you don't need to set this things!

I am quite angry, actually. I am a big fan of Ellen Kushner, and was very exited when I saw that she will release a new Riverside book with Serial Box. But when I checked one of their releases, I saw that they didn't follow three of those four rules! I could change the size, that was about it.

I fiddle with almost every ebook I buy to free the typesetting, but I don't want to accept this as an usual part of reading ebooks. I just don't. Enough is enough!

What could we do to raise awareness of this with the publishers? To think; as they would be cutting expenses by not licensing typefaces for epubs (they need separate licensing per some hundreds or so different book) and hiring designers to design messed up CSS files, they would already be not doing anything to the design which is what we really want.

I mean; what is wrong with the publishers? They spend money to license typefaces for ebooks and then spend more money to pay designers for CSS and than we just strip all of those away muttering darkly. And those who don't know how to do this keeps complaining about faded and hinted type, huge or small line spacing, type unsuitable for epaper...

The state of epubs are just unbelievable. I am one step away from buying into Kindle, only because I just had enough of this. Every book I buy, almost evey book I buy, needs editing just to change linespacing or unreadable type. Look at this, this is from the Serial Box: http://i.imgur.com/B3JJ837.png Only thing I can change here is the size. What is this?

Something needs to change, or my next ereader will be a Kindle. While I think that Kobo produces better devices for me, I don't want to spend time fixing CSS anymore.

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by GERGE

What could we do to raise awareness of this with the publishers?

I mean; what is wrong with the publishers?

The problem is that people calling the shots are old-fashioned. The only thing you can do is wait for them to either go on retirement, or have an accident or something.

The same things happened on the internet in the late 90's and early 2000's. Everybody wanted their website to look as if it was a printed page. Sometimes it still happens today. I can see this with some clients for which I make websites (it's a small part of the things I do for a living.)

I create the website according to the design of the graphics designer, and make the website responsive, working on computers, notebooks, tablets and phones, and everybody thinks it's great and dandy....

... until the 57-year old client comes along.

Then, they want the website to fit onto the screen without scrolling. And not any screen... oh no. They want it to fit onto the 1024x768 screen of their 15-year old notebook. They also want to have the text bigger.... and Bigger... and BIGGER.... and F**** HUGE EVEN! (I have an eyesight of 33%, when wearing glasses, and even *I* can read it from across the room. How fracking BIG do you want it?!) They don't want the website to resize or move. Ever. If there HAS to be scrolling, then they want it in a frame. And of course, suddenly they want *this* color changed to "more bright" (because their old laptop screen is dull as a pile of ***, and off-color as far as can be), and they want "this redder", and that "more yellow".

And after they are done with the website and are completely satisfied, I can only say: "Welcome to the web of 1998..."

Publishers are often working the same way: they are trying to make the e-book edition exactly the same as the printed edition, and it's not working because the e-reader screen not a fixed medium as is printed paper; exactly the same reason why a website that looks like an advertisement folder has never worked, especially now that there are so many devices with different screen sizes.

So, you just have to wait for the old managers to retire or die, and hope they are replaced by someone who actually understands digital content.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by GERGE

Self-published books are usually okay but almost no big publisher understands one crucial thing: we are using ebook readers, you don't need to set this things!

Big publishers spend big money paying formatters and layout specialists.
Telling them their skills and efforts are useless in the ebook arena would only anger them. And you wouldn't like them when they're angry.

Seriously, doing things right requires doing the ebook first and then adapting that for print. The way Indies and smaller tradpubs do.

So, naturally, the BPHs do it the other way 'round.

[theducks]

You (and most MR viewers) are in the minority.

The great unwashed out there want a Click here solution that requires NO decisions other than 'I WANT THAT TITLE'. The book needs to be ready-to-go, with no other setting required. In that, Amazon, B&N did it right with their captive store.

What I object to, is that they go overboard and try and block every user attempt TO DO it their way. If you are that fussy, you know HOW to fix it (or have the $ to pay someone to make it so)

[Difflugia]

Originally Posted by GERGE

Almost every epub I bought was suffering from not following one of these. Self-published books are usually okay but almost no big publisher understands one crucial thing: we are using ebook readers, you don't need to set this things!

Maybe different genres have different patterns, but my experience has been that the big publishers use a lighter CSS touch than the independents. I'm assuming that the publishers hire someone to create the CSS by hand, while a lot of independents use epub conversion software that tries to retain all of the settings of the original Word documents.

[Cinisajoy]

Originally Posted by Difflugia

Maybe different genres have different patterns, but my experience has been that the big publishers use a lighter CSS touch than the independents. I'm assuming that the publishers hire someone to create the CSS by hand, while a lot of independents use epub conversion software that tries to retain all of the settings of the original Word documents.

Most indies I know just upload a clean copy to Amazon. Clean copy means any special formatting that the document had is no longer there.
Some use a word doc, others an epub. I don't know many that use fixed fonts. Unless they uploaded a pdf.

[Purple Lady]

Originally Posted by GERGE

Note: This ended up being a little rant, sorry about that.

1. Leave glyph size to the reader in the body text.
2. Leave line spacing to the reader in the body text.
3. Leave typeface choice of the body text to the reader.
4. Leave justification settings of the body to the reader too.

Almost every epub I bought was suffering from not following one of these. Self-published books are usually okay but almost no big publisher understands one crucial thing: we are using ebook readers, you don't need to set this things!

I am quite angry, actually. I am a big fan of Ellen Kushner, and was very exited when I saw that she will release a new Riverside book with Serial Box. But when I checked one of their releases, I saw that they didn't follow three of those four rules! I could change the size, that was about it.

I fiddle with almost every ebook I buy to free the typesetting, but I don't want to accept this as an usual part of reading ebooks. I just don't. Enough is enough!

What could we do to raise awareness of this with the publishers? To think; as they would be cutting expenses by not licensing typefaces for epubs (they need separate licensing per some hundreds or so different book) and hiring designers to design messed up CSS files, they would already be not doing anything to the design which is what we really want.

I mean; what is wrong with the publishers? They spend money to license typefaces for ebooks and then spend more money to pay designers for CSS and than we just strip all of those away muttering darkly. And those who don't know how to do this keeps complaining about faded and hinted type, huge or small line spacing, type unsuitable for epaper...

The state of epubs are just unbelievable. I am one step away from buying into Kindle, only because I just had enough of this. Every book I buy, almost evey book I buy, needs editing just to change linespacing or unreadable type. Look at this, this is from the Serial Box: http://i.imgur.com/B3JJ837.png Only thing I can change here is the size. What is this?

Something needs to change, or my next ereader will be a Kindle. While I think that Kobo produces better devices for me, I don't want to spend time fixing CSS anymore.

If you want to change things to your liking, why would you get a Kindle? You can't change justification and the changes in line spacing quite often don't work at all or the differences are so small you can't tell it changed. The changes in font size for me go from a little too small to huge. Kindles are not known for allowing you to make your own choices.

[Ripplinger]

Originally Posted by GERGE

Note: This ended up being a little rant, sorry about that.

1. Leave glyph size to the reader in the body text.
2. Leave line spacing to the reader in the body text.
3. Leave typeface choice of the body text to the reader.
4. Leave justification settings of the body to the reader too.

....
Something needs to change, or my next ereader will be a Kindle. While I think that Kobo produces better devices for me, I don't want to spend time fixing CSS anymore.

I couldn't agree with you more. Also, image sizing is nuts at times, they don't understand basic compression. There's a few books I've bought that had a single cover image over 7 mb in size. This wasn't multiple intricate maps that you needed to see details in, it was a generic single cover. The size of the actual text of the book was underr 500 kb. Even if you're reading on a 24" monitor, it's still a waste of space and it's doubtful it would look any better.

When I scan a book, I'll set specifics for pages like the title page and copyright only, and the text itself is just plain generic nothing specified so all aspects can be changed for every reader's enjoyment and not just the quick-clickers.

Kindles really aren't any better, they're pretty much fully locked down at this point what you can change. While you can change the spacing, margins and font sizes, there is a big limit to how much you can change all of those. I have a PW2 and the spacing and margins are just too large for me at the lowest settings. You can't adjust font weight so all fonts look too thin for my eyes. You can't add your own fonts either, they can't be rooted without opening it up and using a serial connection. I never use it other than to get a free read once a month and to test converted books. I'm sorry I bought it at even a sale price.

So I'm happy sticking with epub readers like Kobo where I can at least make the changes to the epubs with Calibre and Sigil and then read them my way.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by GERGE

Note: This ended up being a little rant, sorry about that.

1. Leave glyph size to the reader in the body text.
2. Leave line spacing to the reader in the body text.
3. Leave typeface choice of the body text to the reader.
4. Leave justification settings of the body to the reader too.

You left out one important rant.

5. Leave the margin to the reader.

A lot of the time they make the margins too wide. Most current Readers (Kindles and Kindle programs excluded) have the ability to adjust the margins so you don't have to have no margins if you don't want.

[GERGE]

I think, from now on I will strip everything away with calibre while adding the book. It is better than sending it to the reader, opening it, deleting it, fixing the CSS and sending it again which is my experience with 4 out of 5 books.

[AnemicOak]

One of my pet peeves is recently I seem to be running across a lot of books where the publisher thinks it's a good idea to set the font size for the body of the book to 70%. If they're going to insist on specifying a size, which they shouldn't need to generally, then it should be 100%.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by AnemicOak

One of my pet peeves is recently I seem to be running across a lot of books where the publisher thinks it's a good idea to set the font size for the body of the book to 70%. If they're going to insist on specifying a size, which they shouldn't need to generally, then it should be 100%.

I've also seem a lot of eBooks using a base font size of small. Slightly larger than 70%, but still a bad move.

[Dopedangel]

Thats the reason coolreader is my software reader of choice. Has the option to disable the internal styles of the book. And you can set style that you like so all books would load in that manner when you disable the internal styles of the book. I did not buy a reader till I found that Hanlin v3 used coolreader.

[cromag]

Originally Posted by GERGE

I think, from now on I will strip everything away with calibre while adding the book. It is better than sending it to the reader, opening it, deleting it, fixing the CSS and sending it again which is my experience with 4 out of 5 books.

That's the way I do it. Every time. It's not ideal, but it's more ideal than the alternative.

[ShellShock]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I've also seem a lot of eBooks using a base font size of small. Slightly larger than 70%, but still a bad move.

This really annoys me too. I go through all the font sizes in the css and manually adjust them upwards.