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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?"
(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.
Perhaps, because the Toronto Book Review isn't the one who said it, and it was actually Chris Stevens the author of Alice for the iPad who said it?
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
Linux is difficult to use because of the command line problem
What 'command line problem'? My girlfriend uses Linux all the time and wouldn't have a clue as to what to do if presented with a command line prompt.
Linux hasn't required regular command line usage for a decade now.
"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)."
You have to be very careful about "getting a UI designer" -- many of them have UIDD (UI Designer Disease) and will take a functioning UI and layer on more stuff until it becomes hard to use. Recent battle: UIDD-guy -- "that UI is to complicated -- too many buttons on the main screen"; me -- "but the users use every one of those buttons on a regular basis"; UIDD-guy "but if you just put them in menus you could add other functionality to the program without adding more clutter"; me --"the users don't have any additional functionality requests, they just want to get the job done. You are here because someone higher up decided that everything needs a UI designer review"; UIDD-guy "well this certainly does need to be changed"; me "ok, watch the users use the tool -- the flow goes from upper left to lower right as they do their work, there's no back-hitching, there are no "extra clicks" involved with them getting their work done -- how are menus going to help this?" ; UIDD-guy "Menus are just better because it's less visually taxing. Clearly you aren't listening to me." Months later someone else re-wrote the UI according to UIDD-guy's suggestions. Users revolted and were ticked enough to actually measure throughput and number of clicks. The redesigned and simplified version took 22% longer with 35% more clicks -- so yes with the redesign users could do more clicks per minute -- but it often took two clicks instead of one. UIDD guy still thinks its better because it's cleaner. UIDD is a crippling disorder.
I think he was referring to the Office-logo-style menu that you get when you disable the regular menu bar.
Really, though, the "Ribbon" is a gimmick. All it is is (1) redesigned, reorganized menus and (2) the menu is always "down", and context-shifts automatically.
The benefit of point (1) is highly dependent on how intuitive the reorganized menus are. Naturally, anyone who's used to the old menus will hate them for changing things. However, it does at least seem that they got this much right; it's really not hard to pick up the organization of the new menu system.
Point (2), on the other hand, is an "in-your-face" sort of behavior that you may or may not like. Users who don't know what they're doing might benefit from having the menu right there in front of them. Personally, however, I just collapse the Ribbon (double-click it) so that it acts like regular pull-down menus (albeit arranged horizontally instead of vertically). If I'm doing stuff that requires a lot of menu interaction (text formatting in Word) I might lock it open (again, double-click it) but in general I don't want it in my way.
If you took nothing else away from my post, hopefully you caught the fact that double-clicking the Ribbon makes it go away.
Oh, and the silver theme is much better than the default blue.
Oh yes, don't use the LaTeX' standard "book" package by Lamport. I completely forgot about that because it's so old. But I don't think it's fair to judge by stuff from the 80s. We don't do that with Word either :).
There are much better packages for a long time, like "memoir" or "komascript". But those mainly change the page layout and the default settings for fonts. For the cool microtypography stuff you also need something more recent than Knuth's original TeX compiler, like luatex (which shall finally get to 1.0 in 2012) or pdftex.
In short, just install TeXLive or MiKTeX and use that.
UnNetHack: NetHack Improved!
guess having eBook readers read Word documents is too much of a leap.
You are correct. Word documents are not appropriate for eBook readers because Word layout is handled via some collection of ad hoc and not very clever heuristics. PDF "eBooks" are even more broken, as PDF uses static layout that is incompatible with font scaling and other features you'd like an eBook to have.
ePub is XHTML and CSS with a few extra XML files for metadata. eBook readers are not much more than special-purpose Web browsers, which is sensible because layout is something Web browsers do really well. There is a problem that many eBook readers use a broken Adobe component for rendering, which simply doesn't work properly in many cases: for example, my Sony doesn't handle floating elements properly.
If you want to create eBooks my recommendation is to export your Word doc to plain text, write some Python or the like to process that plain text into XHTML, and use Sigl to create an ePub. That's what I do and it works brilliantly, with the one exception that Sigl uses WebKit for rendering so it isn't broken like the broken Adobe component that breaks on eBook readers that use it. What I do is generate and test the correct CSS in Sigl and then test on the various e-reader applications (Adobe Digital Editions, Amazon Kindle for PC and a couple of others) and put in the required hacks to get the correct rendering on the broken ones (of which Adobe is by far the worst... why anyone would go to a company with no Web browser experience for an HTML rendering component is beyond me.)
Better yet, you can skip Word entirely and write in plain text with your favourite editor (I use EMACS, myself). There is simply no advantage to a writer to using Word.
With regard to TFA: bad book design is ubiquitous, and decent book design is easy. Not ever book requires a unique design, and the number of best practices required to get something that looks as good or better than the average printed page is not high.
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