And this — off topic a bit — brings me to my major beef with Project Gutenberg. A lot of their documents ignore the italics from the original text. This comes from the days before the web when they billed themselves as the home of plain vanilla texts and everything was a .txt file, but their texts are still missing some of the authors intent.

I don’t think that notice is about disrespecting the reader. It’s informing the reader and giving the reader a more attractive option…. an option the reader can choose to override if they don’t find it easier to read than their own choices.

The problem is that readers don’t often know of that option, or they don’t understand it, or they forget about it. The best choice would be for the book to open as the publisher thinks is best for the reader, and then for the reader to have the final choice in overriding publisher typographer, if they desire.

Also, one of the Kindle eReaders doesn’t allow readers to override publisher font choice. That is very wrong. I feel that is Kindle’s fault, not the publisher’s fault.

Focus on putting together a good story and let the reader select the font/viewing options that they prefer.

Imposing a font on a reader is arrogant and, to me at least, indicates that the publisher is totally self-absorbed and inept.

It reminds me of websites nagging me to view them in Internet Explorer instead of Firefox because somehow IE provides a better viewing experience.

Let’s se what is the situation today : the Readers are not free, they can pick fonts vendors let them pick and the vast majority of fonts vendors choose are not adapted at all to reading on a screen. They don’t even ask foundries or specialists which fonts are good.

Then some typographers embed fonts which are adapted, not because they are beautiful, but because they facilitate (facilitating is the job of a typographer). And since vendors are doing such a bad job at typography (check their default settings, cry your heart out), they feel obliged to put such a message.

It is not about respecting readers, it is all about respecting readers. Among those guys are people who consider what vendors offer to readers is utter shit and impacts the overall quality of e-books whose typography is so much ruined by vendors that it becomes an inferior book.

Besides, readers are not supposed to know how to do proper typography. While settings are cool, it is actually a bad user experience to ask them do the job of the ebook designer for each book.

But I repeat, some publishers do that because vendors are doing the worst shit you can imagine with fonts and typography. Simple as that.