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By Chris Meadows

Writer Henry Melton has posted a pair of blog entries meditating on e-book font and layout from a couple of different directions.

Melton’s first post, a couple of days ago, looks at the iBooks reader from his perspective as a writer and self-publisher who formats his own printed and electronic books. Fundamentally, Melton was disappointed that underneath the fancy user interface, iBooks was simply going to be another plain-vanilla ePub reader instead of creating a new format that better replicated the printed experience.

When he formats with InDesign, Melton notes, he has a great deal of control over the final look and feel of his book. He can select fonts, adjust word and line spacing, and generally make it look professional.

When an ebook is displayed, the source material has no layout, and relatively inexpensive web browser like software quickly lays out the text line by line. An individual line of the text may look good, but the screen as a whole may look poor. Add to that, a limited font selection, chosen by a reader based on the whim of the moment or personal taste rather than with an eye to compliment the words, and even a perfectly created source ePub file can never be expected to look as good as a well designed paper page.

In his second post, Monday, Melton goes into additional detail about the kind of font choices that are possible in paper books but not in e-books:


A writer can bring to bear various fonts, a range of italic and bold flavors, dozens of underlining and framing options, and even drop-caps. And that’s just for the manuscript. The thing is, because new writers have all this power, they assume that they can use it. The standard manuscript format, instead of being a shining template of order, is viewed as a straight-jacket that chafes. Many people writing their fantasy opus or convoluted mystery use changing fonts like setting a scene. I’ve heard writers muse about writing a story where every character had their own distinctive font so that they could get away from all the he-said, she-said stage direction.

Melton is hardly the first to think about this kind of thing. William Faulkner famously wanted to use different colors of ink to indicate different chronological points of view in The Sound and the Fury, but was told that publishing was not advanced enough. Faulkner would probably have loved desktop publishing.

And I can see where Melton is coming from about wanting more choices in e-book formatting. Having converted a number of e-books into various formats myself, I have run into situations where I could not reproduce the text on the screen exactly as it was on the page (often in situations where some strange layout was used for computerized or telepathic messages) and had to make compromises.

All the same, the second half of the quoted paragraph makes me cringe. I’ve taken a desktop publishing class; I’ve learned the sort of novice mistakes that DTP newbies make: haphazardly mixing fonts without considering how they might clash, for example. I can only imagine with horror what stories where each character has his own font might look like.

I’ve also seen some brilliant examples of eye-bleeding webpage design caused by novice web designers being overwhelmed by the wide variety of choices available to them. After a little too much of that sort of thing, I can’t help but feel blessed by the enforced simplicity of e-book readers for eliminating at least one kind of bad design.

When you get right down to it, it’s just as Mark Coker of Smashwords said in his piece on e-book formatting for authors:

For long form narrative books, which is what most people read, readers buy books for the words, not the formatting. Don’t let your formatting get in the way of the words.

And Paul Biba covered a speech from Digital Book World in which Liza Daly of ThreePress Consulting indicated that even the simpler e-books are often rife with formatting errors and other blunders. If current e-book publishers can’t even get this simpler format right, perhaps they should hold off on trying to make anything fancier.

Note: I previously covered another Melton blog post on the challenges of e-book format conversation.

 
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