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E-books are ugly, but it’s not the fonts
May 20, 2009 | 5:30 am
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By Joshua Tallent of eBookArchitects.com
On Monday Paul pointed out a post at the Wired blog by Priya Ganapati about the ugliness of eBooks. Ganapati talks at length about how book covers are an important part of a book, how fonts and typography are one of the major keys to a book and how the reader interacts with it, and ends by setting up what is, in my opinion, a false dichotomy between Amazon’s Mobipocket format and the ePub format.
Ganapati’s argument that typography is essential to a book is not completely unjustified. However, I think she is forgetting the fact that the majority of fiction books, which make up almost half of the book world according to Bowker’s numbers, are usually printed without lots of special typography and formatting. It is only when you get into non-fiction that the issue becomes more prominent, and even then the use of various fonts depends a lot on the designer.
Least of my worries: Fonts and typography
As a professional e-book developer who spends his days wrestling with e-book coding and formatting, I see fonts and typography as the least of my worries. Sure, I would love to have a sans-serif font on the Kindle and I would love to see some better support for typographic flourishes in e-books, but for the most part those issues are minor in my work. Laying the book out in a usable and understandable manner is what I deal with most.
Cover design is an even less problematic issue. I see little reason to publish an e-book with a new cover, especially since if someone is looking for a specific book they are more likely to find it if they recognize the cover. Also, I suspect that most eBook readers never see the cover of the eBook once they have bought it, and could care less if it is different from the print cover.
As an e-book developer and a Kindle/Mobipocket expert, I have to take issue with Ganapati’s take on the Kindle format.
A big part of the problem with the Kindle (the largest selling e-books reader) is its use of the Amazon-specific .mobi file format, rather than the open standard ePub. ePub is based on the XML and CSS standards used in millions of web pages and allows for far more control over layouts than is currently possible with the .mobi file format.
I think this is an incorrect and overly generalized comparison. Both the Mobipocket and ePub formats use HTML for layout. While the ePub standard officially supports much better layout options than Mobi, try actually making that happen in the real world. ePub display engines are just as picky as the Mobi format in some ways, and you can pull your hair out trying to make an ePub book that will actually look good on all of the devices and readers out there. In most cases it’s just easier to make the ePub look the same as the Mobi — because the Mobi format forces you to reduce the formatting to a lowest common denominator. The Mobi/Kindle format also forces you to format with smaller screens in mind. With so many eBooks of every format being read on screens 6 inches or smaller, that limitation actually works out to be a de facto requirement.
Now, the Kindle format has its issues, and I can certainly see why some people are unhappy with it. The lack of decent table support on the Kindle is annoying, to say the least. You can’t use borders or shading to set apart sidebars or pull-quotes. There is no sans-serif font, which makes designing a book with some variation a lot harder to do. These and other issues are real drawbacks that will probably plague the Kindle through another version or two.
However, the real problem with e-book design is not the Kindle or the Mobipocket format, nor is it the lack of beautiful typography and new cover images. The real problem is how e-books on the whole are created today. The majority of publishers are not prepared to create e-books in house, so they send the PDFs off to outsourcing vendors in India. The vast majority of these vendors are ignorant of the formatting restrictions and quirks of the various formats and display engines, so their output is not generated with those issues in mind. They create ePub files that, while they might pass ePubCheck, are not designed with thoughtful consideration. The HTML might be less bloated than output from Microsoft Word (though sometimes it is not), but that does not mean it is clean and easily editable.
Often the out-of-house formatters will introduce errors into the e-books that were not present in the print books, requiring complete proofreading for some books. Images are commonly scanned with little regard for their size or resolution, many times making them unreadable. Add on top of this the completely automated conversion processes that are usually employed to create Mobi/Kindle files and other formats, and you really start to see why eBooks look so horrible in many cases.
Until publishers start formatting their own eBooks, using the tools and talent that are available and training new talent to fill in the gaps, we will continue to see consistently ugly eBooks. I await with great anticipation the day when eBooks look beautiful — and I am doing my part to make that future a reality — But I have serious doubts that some fancy font will be the reason for that beauty.
Joshua Tallent is an e-book guru located in Austin, Texas. His company, eBook Architects, provides e-book formatting and consulting to authors and publishers, as well as information about the Kindle eBook format at KindleFormatting.com. Joshua is also the author of Kindle Formatting: The Complete Guide.
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Comments:
>>>Also, I suspect that most eBook readers never see the cover of the eBook once they have bought it, and could care less if it is different from the print cover.
I hope not. I’m really pissed to get an eBook — even a freebie from a publisher — that has a “generic” cover that bears no resemblance to the print version.
Why should we continue to settle for less?
While I agree with Mike about the covers (want!), overall, this is an excellent rebuttal and I’ve found that the listed reasons are absolutely true.
I’m interested to know if Priya Ganapati has ever tried to format an e-book–any format at all.
Regardless what makes or doesn’t make an ebook aesthetically pleasing, I think that most indiviudals purchase ebooks out of utilitarian desire. Money talks, and often times it does so louder at the cost of quality and appearance. What is going to make ebooks more “pleasing” to the eye isn’t going to be fonts, but rather any additional media that comes with the purchase of the book. This media of course would be layered into the book, not a separate file, although that could be a good way to start. Now one thing that needs to look aesthetically pleasing is the electronic reader which the book in read on. At the current time, the readers look okay, but could be much better. I am most anxious to see how this market could go.
I agree that formatting e-books is an area that needs to be addressed. However, concerning the remark about typography being relatively unimportant to fiction readers: That’s not the impression I get from being in a fiction community where e-books are often read. The readers usually can’t identify typefaces by name, but almost the first thing that a Kindle owner told me when she showed off the fiction e-books on her Kindle was what she thought of the typeface. Legibility is a big factor to the fiction readers I know.
Unlike the designers quoted in the Wired article, I’m in favor of multiple typeface options in e-books, precisely because what is considered legible and attractive differs from person to person. I can see that, with a complex layout, it would be helpful to have the typeface set, but with a simple layout, I think readers should be offered choices. The problem with the Kindle is not whether the designers chose the right typeface but that the reader is given no choice.