Slashdot Mirror
Are Programmers Ruining the Design of eBooks?
An anonymous reader writes "The Toronto Review of Books claims that the majority of digital books are awful because major publishers are handing over the design work to programmers, not artists and editors. This results in the 'typographical horrors' typical of so many eBooks, and hundreds of 'lackluster' iPad adaptations. 'Programmers are suddenly being given free reign to design books,' the article laments. 'Most publishers don't care about the iPad or eBooks very much... which may be an aesthetic rejection based on the publisher's historical reverence for the printed page.' Don't we deserve better eBooks?"
Programmers don't really understand good design and usability. Just look at the state of Linux and most open source programs. They might have the specific functionality, but they seriously lack in UI and design. On top of that linux geeks fail to understand that people don't want to use command line to do tasks. Graphical UI's are more fast, easier to use, you don't need to remember commands and even new users can do their thing quickly, without resorting to reading manuals and other crap like that.
Another stupid thing I've noticed about programmers is that immediately when they think of design, UI and easy of use it somehow translates as features taken off or hard to use. That's because programmers cannot think logically like most people do.
Good example is Ribbon UI. Ribbon is actually a great step forward in terms of usability. I wasn't really heavy Office user but have used in from time to time. Same is true now. The difference is, when I use it now, I find it much easier to use and I'm using the advanced features I didn't know about. That's because Ribbon shows them more clearly to me when I need them. I never realised that the features were there or that I should had used them. I'm not going to browse thru all the menus and try the different options. Ribbon presents them to me in an easy, quick format. And this isn't only Office. There are other programs I use that have been "Ribbonized" and I've noticed the same pattern. My overall usage of those programs advanced features has only grown.
Also, considering that geeks usually complain how people don't get them or they're bullied, they seem to have a huge "I'm better and more intelligent than the rest of people" complex. You can just follow slashdot and you see what I'm talking about. Constant dissing of non-geeks, how they're stupid, how people should spend time learning computers (while geeks not wanting to learn stuff like socializing, how sports leagues are going or stuff that interests girls) and everything else. Geeks also look down at designers as in "they don't know what they're doing". Designers are professionals, they know these things better than programmers do. Live with it.
Programmers (mostly) are terrible at typography and it's not just limited to ebooks - it's evident in software, the web, you name it.
I should know. I'm a programmer and my type looks awful.
(Posting AC because I'm at work and I don't log into websites from work...)
I find it amusing that the article linked for this story has some atrocious typography of its own. In today's day and age of CSS3, that sort of leading on the internet is simply unacceptable. If you're going to complain about the typography in ebooks, perhaps you'd like to get your own website in order first.
This is a symptom of the down economy, but also of the must-make-earnings-or-else management style.
PHB's don't see design and development as needing different skillets, they just see two jobs that can be consolidated into one. If you have a programmer who does a B+ job programming and a C- job on design, eliminate the design, produce a C+ product, and then go tell your C*O you eliminated positions without impacting productivity.
There's your problem right there. It's not the programmer's fault if he hasn't been given an artist or designer to work with. If you give an unqualified person a job to do and they do a shitty job, it's your fault, not theirs. Either get someone qualified in, or give them the necessary training.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
Probably what is happening is that management is trying to go cheap on labor. I can see the attitude in my mind. Someone says "Why do we need designers when we can just have the programmers throw it on the eBook for free?"The same thing happened with websites for years, before people realized how important good design really is.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Marketing is ruining the work of programmers.
Just look at the Linux desktop (Unity, Gnome3 reinventing Windows, badly) or Firefox.
Shouldn't the entire point be to separate the content from the presentation? Some people might find it easier to read different kinds of fonts, or line spacings, or what have you. Shouldn't the display be entirely up to the reader, and the ebook just contain the content?
I wish they would. LaTeX is typically much better at typesetting than your average artist/editor using Word. All real programmer would use LaTeX right?
(No, I haven't RTFA)
I don't want specific media for ebooks. I want an ebook device that accurately displays the printed page.
Where's my A4 300+DPI E-ink tablet that's been promised 'just around the corner' for years now.
I prefer my ebooks as .epub, thank you very much.
This sounds like the book equivalent to flash sites. What's better about having every book as a separate DRM infected app which probably only works on iOS? No thanks, I'll stick to EPUB.
It takes a single quote from a review about a particular company's book/app -- it's not a statement in the Book Review's voice. Of course the interviewee wants to make "programmers" look bad - it makes his work look better by comparison. Not that it isn't amazing by any standards, but...
The problem is that the design work is being done by someone who doesn't care about typography and usability, not because it is done by someone who is skilled in programming.
If you don't know about about structure, algorithms and logic, it is hard to give an application design that is novel, implementable and will actually work out the way it is envisioned. But to effectively design you need skills in design as well as actually caring about the usecases. Code is the medium to express design, just like paint and stone can be used to express visual art, but an interface designer who can't code is as useless as an artist who cannot use a paintbrush or chisel. Coding isn't that hard if you can structure your thoughts clearly enough to explain your design to others anyway, there's nothing arcane to it.
So the crux is, two things, equally important, the code and what you are coding.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
The summary is more than usually dreadful. This was a thoughtful interview with the guy that designed the Alice in Wonderland app, ie someone who knows what he's talking about. And he's right.
No more than the display of a web page should be entirely up the client. Often the style is not all that relevant, but sometimes fonts, spacing, line-breaks, placement of images, etc are important to the author intent.
My wife has two e-readers. (Sony and Kindle) When she noticed several glaring errors in one book I picked up the paperback of the same title. The errors were in there too. Converting bad text into an ebook doesn't fix the bad typing or bad grammar.
It's an ironic criticism considering how ugly the font is that they used for the article.
The complete lack of care and attention
That's an odd generalization for programmers. If you hire people who don't pay attention to detail, you'll get sloppy resuls whether they're programmers or designers.
I’m desperate for the book industry to produce some work that blows me away, but for now there’s a few Alice clones and not much else.
Is he actually reading the books or just looking at the pictures?
Thanks also, I don't have to second that since you did it.
That's what stroke me first: "what an horrible typography !"
How ironic.
But then, trying to read such a page is a pain, so I gave up... And that's not amusing.
We already have dozens of readers and formats.
Deleted
Well, most programmers are terrible at everything- including programming. That said, most people are terrible at what they do. :P
TFA is actually not as harsh on the programmers as the summary sounds like. Quote from TFA: "We watch as publishers like Random House outsource the design of cherished titles to programmers whoâ"despite their excellence at programmingâ"are not designers."
Programmers should be programming and the design should be done by designers. Pretty obvious, isn't it? So really the publishers should be blamed for not releasing their books as ePubs or - when the book has requirements that ePub can't fulfill - let designers design the more elaborate eBooks.
Of course programmers usually don't know about typography (unless they have an interest in it [hi fellow LaTeX friends] and I suggest you pick up a good book or blog about it, it's really fascinating).
UnNetHack: NetHack Improved!
and our first offering (which was around for 6 years before being updated) was designed by our development team. It was shit, pure and simple. We had creative types in the group, we had a design person who worked on all sorts of options, but at the end of the day, the development team were in charge (of our start-up) so only what they wanted was adopted.
Even the name of the reader software was chosen by development; I remember the email from one of the developers "we encourage everyone to submit their suggestions on the reader software". This was quickly followed by a clarifying email from the same person saying "while we want to see everyone's suggestions, this is not a democracy, development will decide what the product will be named".
Different companies have different issues and approaches to eBooks, but not every eBook product that's crap is because of ruling by executive committee, PHB's or clueless publishers. Sometimes you have an entire department of entitled, arrogant developers who will actively tell you that customer feedback is overrated because "Henry Ford said "if I asked my customers what they wanted, they'd have said a faster horse". Not one of those developers is still with us today (we've been taken over) but the legacy of their gross incompetence haunts us still and will for a few more years.
Marketers should market, designers should design and developers should shut their fucking mouths and build the product they've been told to.
They may be making an awful product, but it sure isn't hurting their sales... and eBooks are one of the easiest formats to pirate. If anything, they should be a lesson to the rest of the media industry. I think if they actually started pricing them competitively (i.e. at least a little bit less than the real book, instead of more than the real book) they'd make even more money and maybe be able to hire an artist to keep this joker happy.
So really, who says programmers can't design enjoyably readable books?!
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
Of course designers know better design than programmers, that's obvious. Programmers are there to do their job. They program. They build the system and its functionalities. They are not designers, and if they know something about UI and design, it's a bonus, not a defficiency. It eBooks lack decent design, it's because the publishers didn't hire designers. You can build an ugly program with only a programmer, but you can't build a pretty software with only a designer. Programmers are essentials. If you ever need a working app, you know which to hire first.
If programmers designed eBook formats, they'd have vector graphics support.
epubs are great. the PDF ebook are slow as hell because some fricking "designer" thinks it needs a buttload of 5megapixel or higher images, and a background image per page.
Programmers wont do that.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
You haven't met too many professional programmers then, if you're claiming they are the "most logical profession."
IMHO, they for the most part are illogical.
Disclaimer: I am a technical writer, and have a lot of experience with publishing workflows.
I love the ease of obtaining books for my e-book reader. I also love the space savings I get from e-books and not having to choose which physical book to dispose of when I get a new one.
Given good content to work with, any programmer could figure out how to make it beautiful using LaTeX. There are even several excellent packages for typesetting novels out there on CTAN. However, there isn't a mature, standardized workflow to get from LaTeX to epub. I sort of expected this by now. It'd be nice if XeLaTeX had an output driver for epub. Everything on planet LaTeX revolves around PDF output, and it doesn't do tagged PDF output, which means that paragraphs cannot be reflowed. So, you can generate a beautiful document for your e-book reader, as long as you don't plan to zoom, and you have to generate a different PDF file for every size of device out there.
That's not to say that LaTeX and friends haven't come a long way. Synctex and TeXworks make editing a joy. XeTeX and fontspec make font selection easy-cheesy.
However, I pine for the day when I can just do epublatex document.tex or taggedpdflatex document.tex and get awesome output. I don't want to have to rasterize my graphics either... I just want it to work. It's coming, I'm sure.
It's about horseys, you see.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
LaTeX is strongly geared towards producing printed documents. It has a very comprehensive (and beautiful!) amount tweaks, heuristics, and mostly everything is overridable. And while it can be used as the basis for non-printed outputs (i.e. latex2html makes nice structured, internally linked documents), it's not its main goal.
Reworking a LaTeX document to be used as the source for an epub (believe me, I have been looking at it from some different angles for a physical book we recently printed) is... Far from trivial.
'Programmers are suddenly being given free reign to design books,' the article laments.
Given? We're being "given" this?
I don't know how it works in the ebook industry, but in my fifteen years of professional programming in a variety of other industries, I've found that when they "give" me free reign to design the UI, it really means they rejected my suggestion that they hire a designer (if they even asked).
You're pointing at the wrong target, bud -- it's the chucklehead manager, with the designer clothes and designer watch, who thinks designers are a waste of money.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
This is one of the advantages Steve Jobs had.
He knew design. He could communicate to some degree with programmers. His closed garden approach left something to be desired, though.
by Anonymous Coward: I, for one, welcome the shift from car analogies to pizza analogies. um.. overlords?
not the programmers fault. I'm betting the issue here is that when you look at source of an eBook (I know it is true of ePub, and probably most others to a greater or lesser extent), you'll see that the underlying copy is essentially markup. So, I'm sure, when management looks at it they see that "computer programming stuff" and just naturally pass it off to the geek in the basement.
The geek in the basement runs it through his favorite editor, replaces all the new lines with a br tag, all the double new lines with a p and whatever else jumps out at him or her. After spending all of half and hour on and wondering what the big deal was they send it back to where they got it from. It is at this point it should be proofed and looked over to make sure it really does look ok in its intended medium. Unfortunately this apparently isn't happening as often as it should. For the most part though I've only seen a very small percentage of truly poorly formatted books.
I found the whole process of converting my word document, which looked great when printed, into the Kindle format a total chore. It was so bad that I had my best friend finish it and publish it under his Kindle account. That was a couple of years ago and maybe things have changed. I guess having eBook readers read Word documents is too much of a leap.
Home of The Suki Series
Sure, we just need someone to define a universal and finite set of semantic elements that define every possible author's intent. Have fun with Only Revolutions, or if you're the type that thinks it's not a real book if you didn't read it in high school, E.E. Cummings.
Ideal and practical are, unfortunately, two very different things.
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
Doesn't happen in Apple.
PS given the money spent on ringtones, screensavers and backdrops for phones, I highly doubt your "Customizability is not something the average home PC user cares about.".
See that's a programmers opinion (and one that I would also intuitively come up with if asked) and probably why this is a problem.
You want a good ebook you don't get a programmer who views the book as text data, you want an artist who things the line spacing adds to the character of the book and such.
Yes.
Yes you do.
You do deserve better ebooks. Because the current quality of ebooks is destroying the Internet, and, dare I say it, destroying the fabric of America itself. And as every red-blooded American knows, the Internet and the United States of America ARE EXACTLY THE SAME THING.
Every night I weep, weep bitter tears, at the terrible, terrible, quality of ebooks infesting our world. Me, I blame socialists. Or fascists. Or communists. Or atheists. Or Christians. It's the socio-fascist-communo-godless-theocratic industrial complex destroying the world one lousy ebook at a time.
... which is why you should immediately run out and buy a copy of Pay Me, Bug!, available on Amazon.com (Kindle), Barnes and Noble (Nook), Smashwords (epub, Kobe, PDF, LRF, PalmDoc), and iTunes. It is the only chance we all have to ensure a better tomorrow.
Eviscerati.Org: All Hail the Eviscerati
That it. If I can get the damn Linux freaks who despise anything GUI to learn that one thing my users would be happy.
There IS something about dressing things up too much, yes. But that does NOT mean that all style is a bad or useless thing.
Say that again: Style vs Substance is NOT a Zero Sum Game
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKVcQnyEIT8&feature=youtu.be
These aren't real programmers putting eBooks together.They are web developers
There have been several dips in typographic quality over the years, usually when the book industry transitions to a new technology or way of working. Going from Linotype machines to computer typesetting lead to some serious dips in typographic quality for a while. The dip was even more severe when printing was outsourced and most typographers was fired and replaced with layouters and designers. The desktop publishing (DTP) horrors from the late 1980's and 1990 also springs to mind. Usually it wasn't the new technology that was to blame, but that typographic knowledge got lost in the transition to the new technology because of cost cutting measures. The new technologies promised productivity improvements and lower cost through reduction in the workforce, but when the workforce is sacked, their knowledge disappear too.
So it is no surprise that e-books etc. will introduce horrible sloppy typography with no sense of line length versus font size, weird line and word spacing, no knowledge of kerning, no reasoning behind the font used, or matching between text and font.
But over time decent publishing houses will ensure at least some basic standard of typography for their e-books. There will probably not be a return to the high typographic standards of the 1950's early 1960's, but the default quality will be good and unobtrusive enough that it won't disturb the readers. However, the next group of knowledge workers in the firing line are the editors; when they are gone or reduced to merely salespeople, the text qualities of the books and e-books will drop to new low standards.
--
Regards
Teh steve yobs new all about design and was teh worlds greatest programor.
fact!
"Given good content to work with, any programmer could figure out how to make it beautiful using LaTeX .. However there isn't a mature, standardized workflow to get from LaTeX to epub", infernalC
"The second talk came from Andrew Ford, who focussed on converting a LaTeX book to ePub format, using the example of his wife’s cookbook of vegetarian recipes. Andrew explained that the ePub format is a combination of XHTML and CSS, and that LaTeXML has allowed a relatively painless conversion process. Looking beyond ePub, conversion to Kindle format (which unlike ePub is closed)."
There are two main standards, mobi and epub. You don't need programmers to produce these, only someone skilled with html and css. What TFA is speaking about are not books, but those little appgadgets that promote themselves as interactive books (the proper word is horseshit, but in the 90's they were called multimedia cdrom).
Programmers ruin the design of programs, so what do you expect?
Isn't merely discussing this topic running the grave risk of having the ghost of Donald Knuth come from the future, heavy with unutterable wrath, and smite us all?
Yeah, this has been a pain in the ass for me. Ballantine Press (Random House imprint for Sci-fi & Fantasy) has really screwed up the typography on their ebooks. It is clear that there is absolutely no QA going on in the publishing houses. I have yet to buy an ebook from Ballantine that does not require editing of the ebook to make it readable.
McCaffrey's The Dragonriders of Pern trilogy collection is in terrible shape. Typographical errors are bad enough, but the books are loaded with spelling errors as well. It was so bad, I actually wrote a letter of complaint to the publisher. I forked over good money for a story I enjoyed, and found it almost unreadable due to the problems. One of the worst examples was the place name "Ruatha". I found over twenty times when it was misspelled as "Ruath"--in one case, it was even misspelled on a page where they had the correct spelling in the following paragraph!
Of a number of ebooks I've bought from Ballantine, I've had to break open the ebook files on all of them an edit the text and the CSS to correct the errors. It is clear to me that publishers have placed such a low priority on ebooks that they are willing to put out substandard product into the market without any quality control. In Piers Anthony's Xanth series, all it took was two tiny changes to the CSS to fix their typographical mistakes to make it a pleasure to read again.
Example: In the CSS in some of the ebooks, I noted that they had listed paragraph indentation defined as pixels. Well, 15 pixels on an ebook reader are not the same size as 15 pixels on a computer screen or a smart phone display. Pixels are a subjective value where one device can have 300 pixels in an inch another can have just 72. It is better to define text indentation as an objective value such as 1 cm or 1.5 em so it gets indented properly, no matter the device that is displaying the text. By defining the indentation in pixels, the paragraph indentation in some ebooks was so minimal that the paragraphs just ran together and couldn't be differentiated.
I find it ironic that the ebooks being sold by independent (e.g. self-published) authors to be flawless in their display while the ebooks from the big publishing houses with all their resources are all messed up.
Whew! This water sure is cold!
The website of TFA has interline spacing that breaks reading flow and hurts the ability to distinguish individual lines from paragraphs.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
There are two things wrong with that:
AccountKiller
probably 95+% of ebooks are fine as they are. What % of books rely on fancy layout or font gimmicry for presentation? Does that paperback you were reading on the subway need it? The hardcover novel? What % of books are reliant on illustrations as "part of the experience"? I think most of us (heavy e-readers in particular) are in it for the text, not the pictures.
As others have pointed out, screen size, type and resolution all play a part in this too. It would be great if every book could appear on an ereader just as it does in print. Unfortunately, e-readers have not yet discovered how to increase and decrease their size to make that possible.
eBook design: if there is a picture or chart please display it on a page by itself plus it's caption. Allow text sections to flow and be resizable. Minimize space between lines. eBook design finished. Thank you.
Back in the 17th, 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries, typography and page layout was an art. Fonts had complex ligatures and kerning, there were very fancy page decorations, and the first word of the next page of the book was always placed at the bottom right (really!) so you didn't have a break between page flips.
This all went away after WWII, and in some cases even earlier, as some bean counters figured out that they were using a few more gallons of ink per year on what was essentially duplicated information, or page decorations which served no immediate informational purpose.
Anyway, it's ironic that people are complaining about low quality in an industry which has thrived printing whatever will make a quick buck on recycled toilet tissue for the past 50 years.
There's an old, well-honored principle in Unix that explains why it's hard to design a good GUI, a good language, a good interface set or even a good command-line interface: Easy tasks should be easy, hard tasks should at least be possible.
It's easy to do one or the other. It's surprising hard to do both.
--dave
I think this originated as a criteria for the old Bourne shell, and it certainly was part of perl and Elliotte Rusty Harold's XOM.
davecb@spamcop.net
but I only read Playboy for the articles...
But seriously most of the demo units of e-readers I've seen show text on a printed page, and the only thing important to me would be the font scalability and flow when resizing. Pardon my ignorance, but what is supposed to be designed (by programmers no less) here?
Every penny they spend on typesetting and layout is a penny lost in (very meagre) profit ...
Spare me. I've looked at the numbers book publishers put out, and they're obviously full of shit. Did you know even textbook publishers, those guys who think 200 hours of editing and new material between printings justifies a new $220 edition every three years, swear up and down that they make a 1% profit?
1 fucking percent? Are they joking? What other non-commodity business makes 1% and survives? For that matter, almost no commodity businesses make that little, either.
Furthermore, if 1% was true, then ebooks would've driven them out of business by now. I see plenty of ebooks at 40-80% of their print prices. The printing, binding and shipping is only ~10% of a paper book's cost, so a discount of 20% or more on something that usually replaces a print sale- when your profit on print-only editions was just 1% - pretty much means you're fucked before you sell a single copy.
Every e-book, every sale price at Amazon, puts the lie to their claims of 1% profits. Just because Amazon and B&N border on monopsony doesn't mean printers can magically afford to lose money on every sale.
ebooks are "just" what a scanned book would be. if it's just formatting, like column size etc information, that's fucked up then it's not a programmer but a graphic designer doing the work, most of the time I would reckon the problem there being that it really is a graphics designer working with a single device with no understanding of how it would render on different devices - in other words adding too much specific formatting information that they shouldn't be bothering with in the first place.
hypermedia is different, it's like webpages. that's what the programmers are given "free reign" to do when doing ipad versions of ebooks. if it's just an ebook, it's just an ebook. but the thing is that the publishers then want rich media versions of them, even if there's no rich media or contextual information to link with anyways, so of course projects like that are going to suck.
You know what's really funny though? most publishers and publishing industry workers seem to forget this(that they're just old-school hypermedia) totally and view "ipad books" as something totally new! even guys who worked on hypermedia versions on '90s! fucking short memory hype of the day peons. there's this guy in Finland who says that he did the first rich media book in Finland - in 2012! why? because it's on the fucking appstore and not on a cdrom.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Programmers can understand what is a good interface follow the UNIX way properly(simple programs that can be connected by pipe's etc etc).
The problems come from the abomination's (Pulseaudio / avahi / gconf etc etc) trying to make it like Mac OS X or Windows.
Even on Windows I use the CLI more often than Windows Explorer.
This still applies :
http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/ch01s06.html
Particularly these two parts (From 1978)
(i) Make each program do one thing well. To do a new job, build afresh rather than complicate old programs by adding new features.
(ii) Expect the output of every program to become the input to another, as yet unknown, program. Don't clutter output with extraneous information. Avoid stringently columnar or binary input formats. Don't insist on interactive input.
I think the biggest glaring issue here is assuming that an app is an eBook.
If you want an eBook, invest in a Kindle or other "eBook" app/appliance which issues books formatted by the publisher. There the developer creates an app that displays eBooks, but is not involved in the formatting of the book. Of course the app could screw up the eBook format, but then that is fixed with a patch.
If you download a $.99+ app that features a book, you get what you get. A large portion of apps from app stores are horribly written programs rapidly fired off by unskilled developers. "Publishers" taking advantage of selling a book as an app are only interested in profit and care little for the quality of the material they are publishing. They are uninterested in selling the book through a bookstore as they are trying to skip the middleman and take home more profit.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Since TFA is slashdotted, I'm just responding to what I could glean from the /. summary.
The two most popular ebook formats (epub and mobi/azw) are both basically just a collection of html and css files put together into a zip file. The html is extremely limited. For example, in kindle (azw) format, all images are displayed in the center of the page. So, for example, if you want to put an equation rendered as a bitmap embedded in a paragraph of text, you basically can't do it. In most cases, you cannot use javascript. Creating an ebook is also exactly like writing html for the web in that you have to make it work on any device. For instance, a Kindle 2's screen is 260x311 and a Kindle DX is 372x511. You cannot embed fonts and know that it will work on all devices. (E.g., epub 2 allows fonts to be embedded using CSS2 @font-face rule, but the spec doesn't require devices to support it, and many don't.) The CPU on these things is designed for low power consumption, not for heavy processing.
So, given these resources, there really isn't much that you can do creatively in designing an ebook. If it's a novel, it's pretty much going to look like all other novels. It's in a font that the hardware vendor optimized for legibility on that device.
It's true that the formats are becoming more sophisticated. For example, epub 3 (which is not yet supported by any devices), includes mathml, which will allow math and science textbooks to be made into ebooks for the first time. Javascripts is coming.
But be careful what you wish for, because you might get it. Are we really looking forward to reading Wuthering Heights formatted beautifully by a professional designed -- for a screen that's narrower than the one on our own device? How about opening a book and finding that the title of contents is an image, forcing you to guess where to click in order to start reading? How about animations that you can't skip? How about CPU-intensive features that freeze up your device for 30 seconds? What about fonts that looked great on the designer's device, but that look absolutely horrible on ours?
And there are going to be compatibility nightmares that will make the browser wars look like a child's tea party. For example, epub 3 includes mathml, but it doesn't say that devices must support mathml, it just says that they can. So publishers will be selling one version of a calculus textbook for the Nook 17xi (which supports mathml), but a different version for the Nook 16lx (which doesn't) -- and of course an eyeball-bleeding epub 2 version for "legacy" devices, like that Nook 14 that you bought way back in 2014. Oh, you switched to an iPad? Cool, but you find out that the epub 3+mathml version of the book that you bought for your Nook doesn't work on your iPad, because Apple hasn't gotten around to implementing mathml. But you can buy an iPad version instead, only $187!
Find free books.
Yeah it's always the programmer fault when something doesn't work right. Now get out of my office and let me code in peace!
Applying a markup language (xhtml) to text is hardly "programming", but the limitations of the medium all but preclude the kind of elegance nostalgically associated with *some* book typography. First, there's been quite a decline in typography in general, since the advent of "desktop publishing", apart from the perhaps overwrought efforts of a few revivalists. One can find plenty of terrible typography in print, it's pretty much the norm. Secondly, there's a lack of standards across devices (and for that matter, platform releases), which tends to enforce a 'lowest common denominator' approach. See, believe it or not, publishing is a business. I suppose once the demand is established for high-end typography in ebooks, and some better tools come out, you will see some improvement. But good luck with the whingeing.
Did anyone check the typography in your copies of Lords of the Ring or Harry Potter novels before you bought them? How about that Nigel Lawson cookbook?
Except for coffee table books, our buying is determined by content, not form. Until there are alternatives with the same content, and the same price, but different qualities of typography, we won't be voting for typography with our pocketbooks.
Sorry about posting AC.
This problem is huge. I know that we as the tech nerd type tend to view designers as sort of lesser non technical children.
However, it might be a good idea for us to maybe consider what they do. After all code disasters don't make all of us question the need for coders.
Instead, we might take the path that we could learn something out of the deal. There are a bunch of people who offer training to non design people on how to make their design better. most of this stuff is actually really easy to do and it pays off hugely later.
As an example Dan Rubin's Lecture Slides.
I take issue with the word 'Ruining'. There are limited options in 'designing' ebooks. You have your text (hopefully carefully edited) and maybe a graphic or two and you have your ebook design program. Because ebooks must reflow the text when the size of the book chages there is no real typography. You dump in the text file, ensure everything is correct (paragraphs and images), and hit print. Viola -- an ebook is born. The ready must be allowed to change the font, type size and page size.
Designers hate this. Designers love PDFs because you can't change anything. They know that once you give up iron-fisted control over type you have lost the battle and since most 'designers' are little more than over-paid strippers (not that kind of stripper -- PAGE LAYOUT STRIPPER) who can't draw to save their lives they see the writing on the wall. Who needs wonky geek in ridonkulous glasses to tell them Garamond is better than Times New Roman when you make ebooks?
So 'ruined'? Maybe not. Possibly this is the beginning of the end of an era and 'graphic designers', 'layout artists' and their ilk will finally fade from our civilization along with the print industry that spawned them.
Buggy-whip makers the lot of them.
Something like this couldn't have been done without programmers, though.
Right, I'd never read an E book of Playboy unless the asthetics were correct.
Sometimes style is relevant, but often it is not, and when not, the ebook should simply have minimal tags (multiple levels of headings, footnotes, block quotes, verse insertion, emphasis, hyperlinks, bulleted/numbered lists, standard location references [page numbers, chapter and verse, etc.], hyphenation markers for words not in a standard hyphenation dictionary), with the finer details of the typesetting left to the client, just as was the original intent for html, before css. :-) A good ereader application would then let the user customize just about everything else, and save in presets like "Novel", "Reference", etc. I don't want every novel to look different: I want the margins, fonts, paragraph and line spacing, indentation, color, footnote/endnote, handling of illustrations, levels of headings to show in the table of contents, size of font in body, block quotes, hyphenation, justification, footnotes and captions, to be all adjusted to my reading preferences rather than the publisher's one-size-fits all preferences, and to be the same for almost every novel I read on the same device.
Granted, there are going to be cases where more formatting is needed. In extreme cases, the solution is simply non-reflowable pdf. But in most cases, more formatting isn't needed.
I have a lot of ebooks and I buy them regularly. I do not have any problem with ebook quality at all.
Why? Because I buy only ebooks from publishers who provide non-drmed pdfs (i.e. personalized copies, whatever - O'Reilly does it, and InformIt does it, and some others). PDF quality is equal to printed book, and on my Kindle DX and on home computer I can see them perfectly well.
I used to work in a publishing house typesetting math textbooks. My understending of current ebook formats is that they are not capable enough (CSS5 or whatever) and PDF is far superior, and always will be, by design. Unless you sell TeX source and generate PDF on the fly. Because when I see formulae in epub or AZW, I do not know wether to cry or to laugh.
Cheers.
It seems that someone has missed the point. Most of the problems that I have seen with ebooks are due to poor proofreading/editing. Programmers write software/firmware. They should not be expected to edit/proofread ebooks. They may write the software used by proofreaders and editers though. If proofreaders/editers rely too much on software to automatically do their jobs for them, you will get spelling/grammar/formatting errors, as no software is capable (yet) of catching all spelling/grammar/formatting errors and correcting them. I see errors in the local newspaper (I read it online) every day.
I'd say designers should do it only if you have tools designers can use that don't result in a doubling of the hardware requirements. Also, the designers must admit that not everybody wants eye candy and some people just want text. They should offer a way to turn off the eye candy. I'm pointing my fingers at you, almost the entire WWW.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
All of this talk about UI, but not one mention about UX?
The article in the Toronto Review of Books has at least three spelling errors and typos, including the common error "free reign" instead of "free rein". (That's supposed to be a horse term.) The body text is in a sans-serif font, while the headings are in a serif font. The body leading is huge, almost double-spaced. This publication is in no position to talk about layout. Besides, how much good layout can you do on a tiny screen that updates slowly?
As for the eBook Alice, colorizing the Tenniel illustrations is bad enough, and animating them is just tacky. What next, 3D? If you want a good version of Alice, get The Annotated Alice, which is not currently available as an eBook and would look terrible on the tiny screen.
I think many of the publishers want the e versions of their products to be inferior to and harder to use than the printed version.
I have four eBooks for sale through Amazon.com and formerly through Nook. When one submits a manuscript which was previously edited and printed in hardcopy by a publisher the text is put through a translating program. I have sometimes submitted the manuscript in Word form and the program has butchered it. In other cases I have submitted the text as prepared by the publisher in Acrobat format. In such cases the butchering can go beyond the realms of a slaughterhouse.
The article says "free rein". The summary says "free reign". "Rein" is the "correct" term, although apparently folk usage of "reign" is moving up fast.
Is it really that rare, or are you just looking for love in all the wrong places?
John Brockman: the man with a three digit speed dial
We've had superlative typography since the 1980s, but instead the world standardized on Widow Maker and other typographic abominations. Economic man noted the score, and the rest is WYG will make your eyes bleed. Then Steve figured out how to pour feminine charms back into the genie bottle by making the terms of engagement non-negotiable. That's one way to do it. Who knows what user interface nightmares ensue once you begin speaking with each other.
If it's asking too much to straddle two culture, how about being insanely good at just one? From How (La)TeX changed the face of Mathematics
Big mistakes people should stop making:
1. Worrying too much about formatting and not enough about content.
2. Worrying too much about formatting and not enough about content.
3. Worrying too much about formatting and not enough about content.
Tyler Cowen: Be suspicious of stories
Tyler has a nice riff there about how ditching the "good vs evil" depiction of world events immediately raises your IQ by ten points. There are many writers out there who could raise their IQ by an additional ten points investing less in glassy gassy.
As usual, the answer is "Money." By making the first e-ditions butt ugly, they hope to sell prettified second e-ditions to the same buyer at a later date, for even more profit. One more reason to just read the PD-old classics instead.
Oh, I'm sorry sir, I thought you were referring to me, Mr. Wensleydale.
While most of the comments seem to talk about the issue of programmers vs designers, and management cutting corners, only a few of the comments hit upon the inherent nature of varied layouts.
Just as a website needs to take into account different web browsers and different screen layouts/sizes, and user-controlled fonts, so does an ebook.
Designers still hate the fact that a website cannot be controlled by the designer like printed material. How many designers embraced Flash because of the absolute control it took away from the user? The designers tend to view things as stationary, and that is the opposite of all the options available on the web, and in ebooks.
Certainly, we need designers to assist in any creative project. And designers should probably consult a little more with programmers to see if their ideas can be implemented in a more efficient way. Steve Jobs is a perfect example of creating a team of visionaries, designers and programmers.
The problem with an ebook, besides the multiple formats of epub and amazon and others, is the user options. We can read on our phones, on tablets, on computers, in apps on the computers, in browsers. And many reader applications allow for some personalization, like changing colors, fonts, font sizes. So, like a website, we are stuck with basic text formatting to allow for free-flow of paragraphs and dynamic pages.
PDF is NOT an ebook. It is a digital format of a printed page, designed as if to be printed. It certainly looks great, and if put into a flash application, can look like a real magazine with page turning, etc. But, will that work on a 3.5" screen? How will it handle zooming in and out?
I think we need to look at the overall purpose of the product. If it is a magazine, with images and multi-column layout, then certainly the "e publication" needs to be locked into it's print perspective like a PDF. But, if it is a novel, or any book where the message is in the words, then proper formatting is needed for free-flowing text in various sizes. I am not going to view Time Magazine on my phone, but I might want to read an article from Time Magazine. So, now I need two formats.... text only, and Image Layout.
Let's just learn the proper techniques for the layout output we are looking for, and use programmers where needed, and designers where needed. And get those MS Word office workers out of the process unless they learn about formatting with styles, page breaks, tabs, etc. Not many people can know everything, and do everything. Just because the person down the hall makes cool signs for the wall does not make them someone that can create a proper ebook.
I use the GIMP a lot, and honestly don't have any problem with its interface, but I'm appalled at the name of the program. My daughter's school was somewhat interested in trying it out because Photoshop licenses are tough on their budget, but the administration was strongly put off by the name. It's hard to get anyone to take a program seriously with a name like that.
Why would a programmer be designing an ebook rather then an editor or designer?
Maybe because they're the only ones that figured out the software to do it?
In any case, the editors could very easily check what the programmer did before publishing. If they're just publishing it sight unseen then again who's fault is that?
Editors are responsible even if they're not doing the work because they're the editors. If they delegate then they're responsible for what happens when they delegate.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
The best software design I see is found in games. The days are long past when it was acceptable to require users to read a manual or documentation even for complex games. It is now the responsibility of the game developers (often the programmers themselves) to clearly communicate the interface to the user. In a world where competition is extreme, and your chance for success depends on the user's impression in the first 10 minutes, there is simply no alternative. UI conventions and standards within various genres of software, games being possibly the most demanding, dictate to a much larger degree the type and quality of interfaces we see. Programmers aren't too dumb to observe what has worked in the past, and they follow established rules where they have been proven to work.
I have three kids (10,8,6) and a wife all using Linux on netbooks (mix of Ubuntu and Debian) with no problems and never using the command line. All three got their netbooks around age 4-5 and the wife about 3 years ago (she's been afraid of computers ever since University (20 years ago) -- dropped out because of them (short fuse and frustration was too great to do assignments on them)) but is now a daily user :) Note, I switched to Linux only about six years ago and have been with my wife for 17 years, so 11 years of watching Windows and she had zero interest, but Linux finally got her past her fears.
I have a good laugh at people who say Linux is not for newbs; I think it is not for newbs that only "know" Windows, but give it to any kid and they'll run with it. For me, it's nice having them use a computer where I literally don't have to touch it for months on end (basically, I install new versions only, e.g., from Ubuntu 9 to 10). What I love most is how much I am learning from them, as they "find" something new or interesting and then wonder why I didn't know that :)
Don't necessarily blame the programmers. Just as much responsibility falls on management for failing to delegate the proper areas to the proper people. Just because programmers have to know a lot about computers, management will think they will save money by having those same people do design work that should go to a design department.
I've lost track how many times other departments come to me(us) regarding a re-design of a web page. Sounding like a broken record, we are constantly telling them to "Talk to graphics design, we only work on back-end stuff". Time and time again this occurs. It's very frustrating. Then when schedules fall behind, we get blamed for not getting the design done, even though it was never our job to do it.
Programmers design code. Cut them some slack.
The reason that so many ebooks are bad is that there are a lot of lazy publishers out there who simply run (for example) Amazon's Word-to-Kindle scripts and upload the output.
Without ever reading it.
Or even worse, that use OCR to generate the ebook and then don't bother reading it.
But... but... we're so GOOD at user interface design! Being a programmer means you are an expert in everything! Disciplines other than our own are worthless!
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
I remember the same type of discussion here on /. regarding print vs web. People were complaining about websites that looked like they had scanned in their brochures, and for some that was literally true. It seems that the more things change the more they stay the same. The old school still wants to treat the screen as if it were a piece of paper. God forbid that the person doing the reading might want, or need, a different font size. That might disrupt the carefully chosen 1.2345 microsnick paragraph spacing.
I recently downloaded my first iBook to my iPad: The Yellow Submarine. (I'm a long time kindle guy.) First impression was: wow this is gorgeous and shows what an ebook can be. My 2nd impression was: holy crap I can't read this small font, let me bump up the... oh wait it's hard coded. I can see where it really would have messed up the flow of that book if I had been able to change the font. I think the ebook industry needs to have that spark where a new approach to layout is discovered that, right now, no one seems to have.
I will admit that I don't understand much about typography and layout. Most of my reading doesn't require anything more complicated than what can be produced on a typewriter. What I do see, is that we are at a point in time where the screen is taking over, and the print industry is struggling with a change that threatens to leave it behind.
Frank
This is what I've found:
I love reading novels on my kindle. I love the sharpness of the next. I love the ability to resize text. I love having a library in my hands. I love that my wife and I don't have to buy new bookshelves or drop off a bunch of books at Goodwill every six months.
I feel cheated when I come across an e-book that obviously hasn't been reviewed by a human familiar with English -- even mainstream(ish) books like Pratchett's latest, Snuff, had to be revised shortly after release due to some appallingly bad errors. I've been an avid reader for decades; I've seen typos and spelin' mistakes aplenty, but I've never had to slog through entire pages of gobbledygook with dead tree editions of works.
Reference books on my Kindle can be downright painful -- tables are usually inserted as lo-fi images that are often all-but-unreadable. Worse, if the corresponding page in the dead tree edition includes images and tables, on the same page, all hell breaks loose. Things get ... ugly.
But the real killer for me is indexes. I love them. The indexes on my reference books are usually rather dog-eared. I find them indispensable. But only once have I found an e-book, Bloodlands, that included a functional index (i.e., you select a term, you're taking to the correct "page"). Every other reference book I've purchased has an index that is simply a list of words. I freaking HATE that. That is bad design in that a feature you expect to be functional does NOTHING. We're talking Web 1.0 functionality here, people.
But ... you know what? For me this isn't an arts v. science thing many of the people here are making it out to be. The best interfaces are those that involve graphic designers (seriously, Susan Kare's a genius) and nerds. You need design AND implementation to pull things off. The gobbledygook I've seen in e-books? That's obviously some kind of script that fugged up its conversion -- that's a fault of implementation. Tables and pictures that are supposed to show up in proximity to each other, but don't in e-books? That's a fault of design. The data's there, but it needs better presentation.
We all just have to, you know, get along.
The majority of ebooks are poorly formatted because the publisher didn't keep an actual digital copy on hand for anything made before the last 3 years and had an intern OCR a paperback and maybe do some cursory typo fixing at best. "Programmers" don't generally make ebooks normally, the article was about a specific case where an individual book was packaged as a stand-alone ipad app.
We went through this with the butterfly ballots in Florida. People who thought they knew how to design ballots did not actually know how to design ballots. The idea that design only affects how pretty something is is wrong. Apple succeeds in large part because its designs make the products enjoyable to use. There are some people who can handle the entire chain of abilities, but that is not by and large how the economy works. And the bosses have to know this also. Arguably you should cut functionality before design, because without design functionality often becomes inaccessible (that is to say, non-functional). What good is a book if you get a headache reading it?
...and we've seen both. The first is that most developers who write great efficient code usually suck at UI design. They don't know how to make something truly aesthetically pleasing from an artistic perspective. For them, an eBook is just data. If the story is there in monotype font with no antialiasing and no aesthetic flow of the text itself, they've done their job. On the other hand, how many of you remember the "multimedia CDs" of the 90s where a band would release a new album that would typically contain some sort of Shockwave application for Windows or Mac? Some of them were pretty close rivals to the album sleeve art of previous decades. Only they added interactivity beyond just looking at or displaying the thing.
How many of you remember that most of those things were a steaming pile when it came to code? I dissected a few (as well as DVD menus and even DVDs) and found that while the art might look beautiful, there is usually no regard for wasting resources. This is something that coders are driven insane by. You might see the same super large video file duplicated three times in different directories instead of just referencing a single one. The same with graphical content.
eBook designers should strike a balance between providing an aesthetic experience that is at least equivalent to the finest printed books, and as efficient as the most spare Perl script. Good luck finding people who can master both. They are out there, but they're rare.
Getting a programmer or even a lead developer to do the UI and usability design work on a software project is like getting a bricklayer or chief builder to do the architecture, interior design, and landscaping on a construction project.
Sure, you might get something that is functional and works as required but it won't be that aesthetically pleasing. You're more likely to end up with inconsistencies all over the place, particularly if there is more than one person allowed to make individual design decisions on various components. Things will seem disjoint and it is unlikely there will be a coherent theme. Carrying out basic functions will sometimes feel uncomfortable or just won't flow. You are also likely to end up with a mismatch of approaches that are out of date/popular in the previous decade(s).
It doesn't make sense! I can't think of many people or organisations that would think of spending several hundred thousand (even million) dollars on a construction project without having some sort of architect/designer involved and yet people do this every day in the software industry. It doesn't make sense!
Giving someone a set of basic design tools and telling them that it is part of their job requirement that they have to produce product designs doesn't mean they are going to be any good at it. It's like giving some electrical installation tools to a carpenter or a plumber and telling them to go and wire up the new house you're building - you'll end up with a bodgy job. It may also stress out the person you ask to do the job because they know/feel that this is not their specialty and they might internalise their concerns about what they end up producing.
Show some respect to users/customers and to your own organisation. Set your design quality standards a bit higher and get a specialist in to do the job. It might cost a bit more but you'll get it back many times over in the value of the fine work they produce.
If I recall TeX lore correctly, Knuth took a sidetrack to develop a system that would render his books the way he wanted the material to be presented. Today, you can't read his books on an e-reader ... unless you find that giant PDF with rendered graphics of every page.
E-readers will be mature when Knuth will sell you his books in e-reader form.
Linux Journal's graphic designers haven't figured out that the multiple columns, etc. of print doesn't work in ebook. I wonder how long it will take them to figure it out.
Considering how pdf can be used on many different devices with different size screens and different ratios, that's got to be a relatively new area of study. On the other hand, pretty much anything would be better than four columns of skinny text.
Jesus, a lot of generalizing going on. Not all programmers are aesthetically challenged, and not all designers care only about the looks. I know many GOOD UI designers with proper training, and they have a very rigorous process they employ to ensure the usability of their projects. I also know many programmers who intuitively understand good usability for the less technically-minded. Saying all UI designers are useless because Unity's UI sucks is like saying all programmers are incompetent because Windows ME sucks.
Call me crazy. Call me boring. Call me stupid, if you please but I just don't get it. To me, a book needs only text, and the ability to send \n to the device. A book, is, has, and should be, plain text. I can't stand the ebook formats. Far too cluttered with crap like linked TOCs and pictures bordering the page. Normally, if I want to read a book digitally, I'll just grab the latest text dump from some dude on $P2P_NETWORK. At least then, I can read it through anything I want. Better yet, all the formatting is left to whatever program I chose to read it.
As I've seen since using CAD from the days when you selected icons on a tablet instead of a screen - there is no instantly clear way to present the options of any drawing program with a reasonable degree of functionality even if it's just 2D. Blender apparently has a very good interface for what it does and even Gimp makes sense once you understand that the "everything in a single window" of photoshop etc loses it's usefulness with multiple workspaces or even multiple screens.
The .mobi format comes with a very usable default design. There is no need to hire a designer for a kindle title.
If a programmer uses "programmer quotes" instead of “typographical quotes”, no one aside from designers will notice.
Why do people assume programmers have poor aesthetic taste because they are programmers? An ordinary program has as much taste ad the next Joe.. which isn't much. But it's not hard to find a programmer with a background in webdesign. Even if we many not crank out master piece over art, mismatch and mis-alignment are our mortal enemies.
...and we've seen both. First is that most developers who write great efficient code usually suck at UI design. They don't know how to make something truly aesthetically pleasing from an artistic perspective. Some can, but it's a rare bird. For the rest, an eBook is just data. If the story is there in monotype font with no antialiasing and no aesthetic flow of the text itself, they've done their job. On the other hand, how many of you remember the "multimedia CDs" of the 90s where a band would release a new album that would typically contain some sort of Shockwave application for Windows or Mac? Some of them were pretty close rivals to the album sleeve art of previous decades. Only they added interactivity beyond just looking at or displaying the thing.
How many of you remember that most of those things were a steaming pile when it came to code? I dissected a few (as well as DVD menus and even DVDs) and found that while the art might look beautiful, there is usually no regard for wasting resources. This is something that coders are driven insane by. You might see the same super large video file duplicated three times in different directories instead of just referencing a single one. The same with graphical content.
eBook designers should strike a balance between providing an aesthetic experience that is at least equivalent to the finest printed books, and as efficient as the most spare Perl script. Good luck finding people who can master both. They are out there, but they're rare.
(This comment is an altered repost of something I accidentally posted anonymously yesterday.)
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
I fully agree with you. I was the same, so I converted over to KDE4. Then I spent a long time working out how to use facilities like multiple desktops and multiple activities under KDE4. I work in different areas at different times of the day, and the KDE activities approach seemed ideal.
But the practical reality of it was that I just got in a mess.
What I did realise then - how good Gnome3 is. I've gone back to it and now I find the older interfaces limiting.
Things that are really good
1) I run with multiple screens - having my secondary screen remain in place when I switch workspaces is fabulous. I can put an important source document on display and then work in the different other documents each in its own workspace, surrounded by the support applications I need for that part of the work
2) Growing an shrinking Workspaces automatically. As I start getting too complicated (too many windows to work on comfortably in one workspace, I through some stuff to another workspace.
3) Minimising by flicking my wrist (and moving the mouse to the top left hand corner) - and getting a dynamically visual view of applications. I often work and watch MythTV in the evenings, and being able to here something important about to happen on the TV when I am working on an overlaid window, that flick allows me to immediately watch the action on the TV
I do have criticisms though. It was insane to make Suspend the default option closing down - I want power off (I know there is an extension that does this - these aren't yet just available as Debian packages). There seems to be bugs that can hang the closedown process if you cancel it half way through. I can't find my apps very easily - seems to be very particular about having .desktop files in the right place. Often I can install some thing in Debian and I can't find the app.
Absolutely true as far as it goes, but this principle fails to account for the mass appeal and commercial success of Apple's approach to UI design. Taking iOS as the prime example of Apple's approach, it seems to be: everything doable must be simple, and what cannot be done simply will be impossible. So the hard design choices are in choosing what will be allowed, and the corollary is enforcement of consistency across applications. Whereas the "easy tasks should be easy" principle alone leads to something like GNOME.