Comments on: Michael N. Marcus: Ugliness of e-book formatting bleeding over into print books

By: ralph

ralph — Fri, 21 Dec 2012 22:29:57 +0000

I’ve just discovered an amazing con. The self publish game! I’ve been an entrepreneur all my life. To begin with when you make any thing you compute the list price by calculating your cost by five. These mofoes compute by at least eight. They add insult to injury by making you pay
on top of your initial investment, for marketing, and everything else they can think of to get
you. To further humiliate you, they want you to buy your books at .50% off retail. I’m a New Yorker, and have been in business all my life, and I see this as an outright con. You should get your copies at cost. If not at least .10 or 20% above cost. After all you’re out there promoting the book, and they profit on every book sold. If you didn’t write it, they would have it. They’re
taking advantage of people who want to have their work published. Something should be
done. I’d be more than happy to join any group or org interested in doing something. Get the
media in your area to look at this. A lot of people are getting rip off! If there is a solution to resolving being rip off by one of them- I would love to hear about.

By: Danny O. Snow

Danny O. Snow — Mon, 27 Dec 2010 21:30:25 +0000

Hi Chris (with CC to Mr. Marcus):

Happy holidays to all. This is U-Publish.com co-author Danny O. Snow, responding to Mr. Marcus’ rant about the page layout of my book with Dan Poynter.

Not to sound defensive, but…

a) Please feel free to download the iPhone/iPad/Droid app and adjust the font, leading, kerning, etc. to your heart’s content.

b) In my world, where printed and digital material is increasingly interchangeable, a prime goal is to use a kind of “lowest common denominator” in terms of typography. Because our books are manufactured in paperback by many different printers (each with different specs), and published electronically by multiple suppliers for a diversity of platforms, each with a different screen size, default font, etc. it simply doesn’t make sense to get too anal about it. Each reader will probably see something different, depending on the medium.

Instead, Mr. Poynter and I try to focus on the information conveyed by the text. We believe that the information is what matters to our readers, much, much, much more than the presentation.

BTW, the page layout of the 2010 edition was inherited from Borders, which used it as the guidebook for its national “Borders Personal Publishing” program (circa 2006-2008) before their stock collapsed and the program was (sadly) scrapped. Like any professional writer, I’m accustomed to seeing my work appear in print with changes in content and design according to the publisher’s choice. Whining about editorial and design trivia is for hobbyists — and victims of vanity presses, who can micro-manage production details… at a price.

In closing, I recently got a rare 1912 edition of Mark Twain’s classic “Life on the Mississippi” with incredibly horrible fonts, leading, kerning, ad nauseum. Guess what? The primitive typography didn’t diminish the genius of the writer at all.

Thus endeth today’s sermon.

Respectfully,
Danny O. Snow

By: Robert Nagle

Robert Nagle — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 07:10:00 +0000

I’ve been getting my feet wet in ebook formats. And the Amazon format is atrocious. No floats, borders, backgrounds. Holy Cow! I don’t care if they lower the price and market the hell out of it. Why on earth would anyone buy an ebook in a format with such limitations?

Even on the ipad, there are lots of design limitations. The only way apparently to design an interesting ebook is to ditch the ebook apps altogether and make your own app….which is sad…

By: Jordi B.

Jordi B. — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 12:33:59 +0000

I find it really annoying that whenever the Kindle finds too long a word, it just leaves a major gap at the end of a line, leaving that line unjustified.

As Doug says, different languages have different hyphenation rules, and using one language rules (i.e. English) for every language just won’t do. The t2s engine in the Kindle is a good example for that.

One implementation of the Hanlin V3, the Papyre, has full hyphenation in Spanish. I think it only works with a custom firmware and only for the FB2 format, but I’m not sure.

Also, do major ebook formats allow tagging the main language in ebooks? I know ePUB does, but I’m not sure about Mobipocket. Additionally, there should be support for specific words being tagged as being in a language other than the main book. Do major ebook formats support that?

@Eugene: I would notice, at least in my mother tongue.

By: Stephen Tiano

Stephen Tiano — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 00:13:32 +0000

Until someone or some software comes up with an algorithm that does for eBook typography what PageMaker, Quark, and InDy–to name just three; there are certainly others–I tell my clients that it’s advisable to lose full justification in favor of ragged right when going to eVersions of their print books. eBook typography simply does not allow for good-looking full-justified text. Look at any website that attempts it. I’ll grant you, tho’, that it’s kind of sad to see a product (eBooks as a whole) out there before it’s really isn’t ready for primetime.

By: Eugene

Eugene — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 23:11:05 +0000

Microsoft Reader has hyphenation, and at least in English it is very well done. What about purely algorithmic hyphenation? Would people even notice if a word wasn’t hyphenated “correctly”? Probably not. Japanese, for example, doesn’t use hyphenation. A “word” can be broken anywhere. You just keep reading until you hit punctuation.

By: Doug

Doug — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 22:51:50 +0000

Frode: hyphenation in e-books is mainly left to the reader software, and the reader software mainly doesn’t do hyphenation because it would require an extensive hyphenation dictionary for every language of interest.

None of the big-name e-book readers do hyphenation. They’ll just put the long word onto the next line and put lots of blank space into the current line. Bookeen has claimed to have hyphenation for Mobipocket e-books, but apparently it didn’t kick in unless there was a huge gap being left, so only worked at really really large font sizes. (I know nothing about that except what I read on the Web.)

I don’t think most people care. They’re so accustomed to reading unhyphenated Web pages that an unhyphenated e-book doesn’t look odd at all. If the e-book doesn’t attempt to justify the right margin, the lack of hyphenation is hardly noticeable.

By: Frode Aleksandersen

Frode Aleksandersen — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 22:07:39 +0000

Quick question – how do ebooks lack hyphenation?

By: Katherine

Katherine — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 21:29:56 +0000

Wow, people will really come up with ANY reason to complain about e-books. Now they blame bad typography on them? Travel back with me to the 70s or 80s, my friends. Grab any mass-market paperback off the racks and cringe.

I have some books in my house I’ve been meaning to read for years, and I’ve finally come to the conclusion that I’m not going to, because the typesetting and page layouts make it painful to read. Good books, bad typography.

Now, I have heard similar complaints about the advent of desktop publishing and its effect on print publishing and design… and yeah, maybe there, there’s a point. If somebody doesn’t know what they’re doing and they’re the visual equivalent of tone-deaf, yeah, they can make some UG-LEE books. But the tools have gotten better and people can be taught.

Good design is one of those things that’s very hard to automate, though…