What would Gutenberg do?
The other day, Teleread featured a post lamenting what the author saw as poor typography and formatting in converting book content.
There are some inaccuracies in the post about what Bookworm can and can’t do (these are addressed in the comments), but throughout there is an underlying premise that an ebook should “look” like books long have looked. I’m not favoring hyphenating question marks, but do we really need to worry about four-word orphans at the top of the next page, when “page” really has little or no meaning?
In our XML project, we found that publishers planning a migration to XML need to start by answering five questions, the first two of which are:
- Where are we now and where do we want to end up (faster? better, as in fewer errors? more agile? with what relative emphasis?); and
- How much benefit do we want to obtain from content reuse and repurposing?
Books that were created without having answered these questions first (typically, books created before repurposing seemed like a valuable activity) present the greatest conversion challenges. Beginning with the broader end in mind, which is what we encourage publishers to do, opens up a dialogue about the potential of a new medium, more so than the problems of making the new medium work for the existing content.
With Epubzengarden, Liza Daly has done great work to demonstrate the potential for reworking content to fit the reader’s preference. Her work suggests to me that some of the lament about appearance may be less about quality and more about loss of control.
It’s a limited analogy, but I see html as a tool that enables control over appearance and xml as a tool that enables control over use.
A variation on the Heisenberg uncertainty principle: you can specify appearance, or you can support use, but you can’t really expect to do both simultaneously. Between html and xml, control moves from appearance of content to the rules for presentation of content.
Folks laboring mightily in html to craft the perfect e-book remind me of the monks of the middle ages, carefully copying pages of previously published manuscripts. The works were often beautiful, but they took time to produce and there were just a few of them around.
I think there is a place for works of surpassing beauty, and there is a (probably limited) market of people who would pay for them. Illustrated manuscripts today are essentially priceless. But I imagine that in 1439, monks standing around the first sheets of Gutenberg’s (lovely) Bible were shaking their heads, clucking their tongues and saying (in German), “But look at the kerning...”
Updated September 27 to add: Kassia Krozser of Booksquare has a post up about accessibility from the reader’s perspective. Very on-point and without all this egg-headed stuff about Heisenberg. Check it out. Also, here is a New York Times piece on format proliferation that amplifies both the challenge and the opportunity.
Comments
Part of the frustration people may have with ePub and ePub-rendering software may have less to do with what we expect from book typography and what we’ve become accustomed to on the web. H&J;aside, the CSS control and general sophistication of modern web browsers is way better than what I’ve seen out of things like Stanza. Which is ironic, because it’s all the same technology underneath: HTML and CSS. Shouldn’t an ePub tool give you control comparable with what good web design provides?
Posted by
John Maxwell on 09/07 at 01:29 PM
It should, certainly. I think some tools aren’t quite ready for prime time (the initial link is adequately critical of Stanza). One of the things that stands in the way of better tools is consistent application of standards at scale.
It wasn’t that long ago that we worried at length about how content would appear on various browsers. (Seven years ago, I had a client who published web content every week and spent the better part of the day prior to going live testing content to see how it looked on various browsers.) Evolving standards, sufficient volume and some consolidation among the options (and the rise of some good open-source options) helped us pretty much solve that problem.
If publishers learn to live with the idea that formatting content for multiple uses, at least one of which can be derived using CSS, then the era of hand-made html and 100% inspection may come to an end. However, not all book publishers may be comfortable letting things get sorted out over time.
Absent a vertically integrated solution, this leaves us at a bit of an impasse. I think the work your team published earlier this year (in part calling for the use of xhtml as a more effective bridge) is a practical step. Of course, with xhtml, you still have to trust the rendering when it occurs, or we’re back to html and inspection.
Posted by
Brian F OLeary on 09/07 at 02:02 PM
brian said:
> you can specify appearance, or you can support use,
> but you can’t really expect to do both simultaneously.
it probably won’t surprise you to hear that i disagree…
here’s something for you to look at:
> http://www.ibiblio.org/ebooks/Mabie/Books_Culture.pdf
that’s an e-book that was intentionally designed to
mimic the paper-book from which it was digitized…
(just click the page-number, and you will see the
google-books scan for that page, to compare it.)
the problem with it, of course, is that it is a .pdf…
however, that .pdf was obtained from an input file.
in this case, the input file was a microsoft word doc,
so it is still objectionable for a number of reasons…
but if it was a file that used plain-text light-markup,
such that it was maximally pliable for various uses,
then it would have attained both of your dimensions.
i think default presentation for an e-book should be
something that exactly duplicates the p-book look…
(indeed, the e-book should be _create_ the p-book.)
however, the e-book should retain great flexibility,
so that it can be molded into any shape a user wants.
light-markup can attain that. this is what i have been
working on, so i tell you this with supreme confidence.
(heavy markup can attain it too, but at a higher cost.)
-bowerbird
Posted by on 09/28 at 02:16 PM
Hey, great to see you on my blog 
Welcome!
I follow your point, and I like the example. I don’t know that we disagree. The more a publisher focuses on controlling appearance across multiple formats and devices, the more expensive the conversion and the less flexible the end result.
What you’ve described is an approach that fixes the first format and then allows the user to control what happens after that. To my thinking, that’s the absence of control on the publisher’s part - content is set free. If we can do that with light markup, better yet.
Posted by
Brian F OLeary on 09/28 at 03:01 PM
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