Two articles crossed my inbox the other day that approached the concept of 'respect the reader' from different angles. The first was a write-up about a now-controversial Kindle edition of the beloved Canadian classic, Anne of Green Gables, which has stock cover art that portrays Anne as a buxom blonde, and not the humble-looking (but spunky) redhead the book describes. They designed the cover without even reading the book! They desecrated a beloved classic! Gasp! The second article was from a Web designer, Baldur Bjarnason, who writes about a trick he's noticed some e-book designers employing, and which involves a brief note that...

Craig Mod, a writer and designer who was part of the original Flipboard app design team, has written a very interesting discussion of what book covers were originally meant to do, and what to do with “covers” in the age of the e-book. It’s a very long and thoughtful piece (with footnotes), and points out that covers came to be as they are because of function dictating form. Physical book covers exist for a reason, Mod writes, and that reason is to protect the book’s interior, but also to attract the reader’s attention and also to set expectations and...

You can’t judge an e-book by its cover, because it usually doesn’t have one—or at least one that you can see without having already bought the book, which renders being attracted to it on a shelf fairly moot. I’ve written a few pieces about that here already. But here’s an article with a slightly different slant than the, “Oh no, we’re losing book covers, what will we do now?” complaints of the past. The Atlantic has a piece looking at what digital book designers are doing about it. [Abrams publishing editor in chief Eric]...

When you make a decision to publish your book only in digital format, you are also making essential change in how you approach cover design. You no longer have to deal with dots per inch in a high-quality print. The goal is not 9 x 6 inch, 300 dpi any more. It's 1024 x 600 px, 118 ppi of a typical netbook's screen or 800 x 600 px, 167 ppi of a Kindle 3 display. We also have to keep in mind that the readers very seldom will have a chance to see the cover in full screen. If yes, it's going...

This is a first of a series of posts about opportunities which arise when you design a cover specifically for ebook. There are three approaches to covers: - ebook cover is a copy of a print edition, - one cover is designed for both print and digital edition, - a cover is designed for ebook only. I’d like to focus on the last one as it creates much more possibilities than you would originally think of. And all this can happen if you just switch the perspective. A different approach, free from constrains typical for print production – and taking into consideration circumstances typical for digital...

A New Kind of Book has posted a couple of examples of how ebooks might add supplemental content like footnotes without interrupting the reading flow. If you've experienced footnotes or endnotes on the average modern ebook (at least on the major retailers' platforms), you've probably noticed how clumsily this has been handled to date. It usually requires clicking to a "back of the book" section, then pressing a return button—all the shuffling of print with none of the helpful spatial cues like keeping your finger between pages. The two examples he shows include a pop-up window that hovers over the...

Mike Shatzkin's latest post looks at how designers and developers of illustrated ebooks for adults might want to take a somewhat modest approach to the format, eschewing multimedia bells and whistles for a classic fixed layout that lets the reader zoom in to view details: We have 500 years of experience figuring out what makes an illustrated book that the person holding it will find appealing and useful. Designers learned how to use spreads (placing content across two facing pages), which don’t exist on digital screens (unless they are artificially created there.) They learned how to use sidebars to hive off...

In May, I mentioned a writer’s thoughts on what the rise of the e-book would mean for book covers. Today I found an article considering what badly-designed covers mean for particular e-books. We reported in March on agent Sonia Land’s deal to publish Catherine Cookson’s backlist digitally through Amazon, bypassing Cookson’s print publishers altogether. On Futurebook a few days ago, Simon Appleby posted a column poking fun at the e-books’ frankly hideous covers. Essentially, all the book covers look more or less like the one posted at left; the only differences are the title and the background...

We've had some controversy in the comments over whether aspiring self-publishers should desigbn their own books. Here's a site listing what they consider to be the top design and top typography and font blogs.  This is what they say: They say don’t judge a book by it’s cover, but sometimes it’s the cover that draws us in to further explore what a book is all about. Book design has taken off with the rise of the Internet because there’s a clear sense of what readers are looking for when they hit the bookstore in search of their next read. These graphic design...

We first covered the lawsuit by Spring Design, maker of the dual-screened Alex e-reader, against Barnes & Noble back in November, 2009. Spring Design claimed that it had designed the Alex in 2006 and worked with Barnes & Noble since early 2009, and that B&N took advantage of this cooperation to copy features of the Alex’s design (notably, the addition of a color LCD panel to a greyscale e-ink panel) in the Nook. Now Reuters reports that Barnes & Noble has failed to convince a judge to dismiss the lawsuit. The judge cited a “significant factual dispute” over whether...

I’ve talked about PADDs before, the hand-held touch-sensitive tablet computers used in Star Trek: The Next Generation. I mentioned Jeff Kirvin’s remarks about it in regard to the Palm device that later became the Pre, and subsequently compared my new iPod Touch to the device. Now Ars Technica has interviewed production designers Michael and Denise Okuda and Doug Drexler from TNG as well as design staff from other Star Trek shows about the design process that led to their imagination of the device to which the iPad is only just catching up, 23 years later. It is...

Stephen Coles at The FontFeed has an article about what the iPad is missing. As you might guess from the name of the website, it is about the iPad’s typography and font selections. Coles dislikes the way that iBooks uses full justification with no hyphenation, causing wide gaps and “rivers” in text displays on-screen, and lacks proper handling of widows, orphans, and line breaks. (Liz Castro of the “Pigs, Gourds and Wikis” blog has an article about formatting problems with a number of books in iBooks, from which Cole took one of his screenshots.) I definitely have to agree that such...