It is still early days in e-book development. It is not going away anytime soon, the whole evolution of digital technology dictates its eventual triumph.

Meanwhile, we are stuck with the problem of how to develop things and which direction they should follow.

EPUB is not only an open format, it is capable of development in practically any direction, including PDF generation, p-paper printing, aural renditions and various levels of reflow. It does not do this at the moment, but as a format it is more envelope than contents, which is a good thing.

I believe the real question is not either/or, but how to have both forms together in the one publication.

As for ‘it keeps jobs for designers’ I say (and this may sound harsh) that the designers need to suck it up and adapt with the times. The marketplace grows and evolves and changes. I read a novel set in pre-WW1 Poland, and they had people in the village whose actual job it was to carry water or deliver milk or clear the streets of hay every morning. All of those jobs are now obsolete. Or how about the manufacturers of clothes-wringing machines? They had to either learn to build electric ones or go out of business.

I am not anti-book. There are definitely certaint ypes of books I do prefer to buy in paper and always will. That includes not only graphics-heavy things like cookbooks but also plain-vanilla prose fiction (if the book is a cherished favourite, I do enjoy having a print copy). But for fairly disposable mystery/romance/reads of the day bestseller type stuff, I prefer E because I can read it and get rid of it (or keep it should I wish, and not have to worry about storing so many one-off reads in my smallish apartment). And for that kind of thing, it frustrates me when needless barriers are put up. Do you really think Nora Roberts cares what font size I am using? Wouldn’t she rather get her newest book in as many hands as possible while the fire is hot?

Take a history book where indexing, footnotes, illustrations, diagrams, glossaries etc., plus typographical tables in the form of genealogies and coherent typography is critically important and not amendable to ad hoc changes made haphazardly.

Consider Beowulf in Anglo-Saxon, with a glossary and two or three different translations that may be read concurrently, or Chaucer with references etc.,.

Restrict e-books to novels and light fiction only and it is unnecessarily doomed to trivial entertainment (eg an annotated Jane Austen, is not easily amendable to any form of user preference, if the annotation is to be useful).

PS I am not making any argument for PDF, but rather a fuller and more versatile form of CSS within the EPUB format.

Jon Jermey, unfortunately with more complex publications layout can be an essential part of its readability. Narratives are the simplest form to typeset, unless used for study they are simply read from beginning to end and in a sense every part has the same and equal value. Not so with other non-fiction works (and I am not talking about decorative graphic eye-candy).

I later learned that using baby spinach instead of mixed baby greens (with the purple) will give the smoothie a much happier vibrant green color. Having swapped the ingredients, I find people are much more willing to try it and admit liking it and no longer have the tastes-as-healthy-as-it-looks fear.

So for my understanding of the argument, the publishers feel they have to make it look pretty because the (majority of potential) customers will otherwise be hesitant to try something new. It’s certainly not true, but there’s a mindset that production values reflect the quality of the product. I’m sure I could dig up some sociology studies that show how people’s presumptions about and perceptions of a product’s quality are affected by presentation, but I’m too lazy right now, and I think (hope) that the point is kinda clear.

See, this is where I am not following the whole “Yay, PDF” argument. I don’t understand this ‘need’ you allege the publishers have. If I am sitting at the hairdresser without my glasses and I can’t make the font go bigger, it is not aesthetically pleasing. If I am not able to reflow the text to fit the screen of my reader, it is not typograpically coherent. Why do you say the publisher has this ‘need’ and what benefit do they derive from it when it so obviously can’t be a factor in a digital marketplace? I am just baffled by this whole argument, and I really don’t see why JK Rowling or Stephen King or whomever should care if I want my Harry Potter or The Shining in 14 pt or 10 pt—or, sometimes in 14 pt AND sometimes in 10. Unless the book in question is some sort of illustrated art edition where they want us to see the pictures, who cares? Someone explain this to me. This whole ‘need’ you say the publishers have makes no logical sense to me at all.

As a feature the ability to make a User’s stylesheet is very much welcome, however it needs to be balanced against the publisher’s need to present the publication typographically coherent and aesthetically pleasing. Moreover, that means the publisher needs a better stylesheet system than those currently available (CSS can suffice, but in a more modular and dynamic way).

The problem with leaving too much to the reader software and the reader, is that some publication may well need to use flexible XML rather than HTML and the tag sets may be extensive and unpredictable. However if we think this one out clearly we could well have the best of both worlds.

Certain elements, no matter what they are called, are common: Fonts families, headers, footers, footnotes, page, margins, paragraphs, macro divisions (chapters, sections, parts). These need only declare their element sets, to deliver to the user a subset that can be predictable changed, so long as the stylesheets supplied by the publisher are well designed to begin with.

We have a fair way yet to go before reflowing e-books take on a definite and long-lived form.

For most straight form narrative, like what most people read most of the time, it’s best to liberate the words from pre-conceived notions of formatting and let the reader decide how they want to enjoy their book. Epub is a step in the right direction, but many people seem to forget we have most of what we need today in the form of plain text and HTML. Readers should be allowed to buy a book and customize all aspects of their reading experience such as font size, font style, font color, background color, reading device, reading media, whatever. This is the aspect of digital publishing that gets me most excited – to achieve the holy grail of your book, your way.