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Are Programmers Ruining the Design of eBooks?

Posted by samzenpus on from the homer-car dept.

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?"

43 of 470 comments (clear)

  1. Yes! by DCTech · · Score: 1, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Yes! by tripleevenfall · · Score: 4, Insightful

      On top of that linux geeks fail to understand that people don't want to use command line to do tasks.

      Well... I think what Linux geeks miss is that the parts of Linux that they like best are things the general public is not interested in. Customizability is not something the average home PC user cares about. They want things to "just work". The standard for "easy" is Apple, and people don't feel like computers should be any harder to use than that.

      Hobbyists, which is what Linux geeks are, want something different than everyone else does. There are some people who enjoy working on cars and fixing them, customizing them, souping them up, doing DIY repairs... most people just want to get to work without thinking about it.

    2. Re:Yes! by geminidomino · · Score: 5, Insightful

      And here, boys and girls, we have one of the so-called "designer" types that has been fucking up Ubuntu et al for the last two years.

    3. Re:Yes! by ibwolf · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Programmers don't really understand good design and usability.

      While sometimes true, it is far more commonly a failure to understand the user. The ability to evaluate the usability of an interface, not just based on how it fits your needs, but on how it would fit someone else's needs is rare and requires a good bit of cultivating. Of course everyone thinks this is easy because they know what is wrong, but it is really the same as with the programmers, you just know what works for you. So you might reword that statement as "People don't really understand good design and usability."

      And to bring this back on topic, artists and editors are (on balance) no better at usability than programmers. They do however have significant domain-specific insights into how to present readable text and that should not be discarded. You should however also bring in usability experts to help design the interactive aspects of your e-book experience.

    4. Re:Yes! by Xanny · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Not to detract from the programmers are stupid bandwagon here, but I'm pretty sure the groups of people who are extremely artistically deficient and who program are not correlated in any strong way.

      Linux is difficult to use because of the command line problem, yes, but more so the problem is that Linux is a hodge podge of software that need not work well together. A lot more stuff is user space than in windows / osx and the tradeoff is that user space stuff isn't tested with rigor to work 100% of the time like kernel mode stuff. It leaves Linux more secure but user space programs failing that average joe has no idea how to remedy does not make him happy.

      But overall, as a programmer, I do take offense to not knowing how to design a UI. I know perfectly well how to. All you do is come at it from the perspective that it needs to work for someone who has no idea how anything works (aka, my mother) and someone who knows how everything works (aka, me, if I made it) and make sure there is no gap in the swathe of people between those extreme points where the design fails to, if not intuitively, at least give them the ability to change it to become intuitive for them, naturally favoring the lower end where significantly more people are than the high end.

    5. Re:Yes! by JasterBobaMereel · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Linux is Unix, Apple (iOS, and OSX) is Unix, Android is Unix ... All totally built around the command line ...?

      How many times do you use a command line (or even see one) on any of these in normal use ...? ...about the same as in Windows ... i.e. never ...

      Unix was designed around the command line 40 years ago ... but you don't need it anymore for everyday use, this is not stopping you using it, but you don't need it now unless you are customising the system ....

      --
      Puteulanus fenestra mortis
    6. Re:Yes! by icebraining · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Many Linux geeks don't "miss" it, we just don't care.

      --
      Dilbert RSS feed
    7. Re:Yes! by ByOhTek · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Most of the time I'm on Linux (or BSD for that matter), I use the command line. Mostly because, for what I do with it, the GUI tools available on either aren't very good. Particularly for file navigation/management. In general they either look like garbage, or just feel kludgy in the way the act.

      --
      Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
    8. Re:Yes! by beelsebob · · Score: 4, Insightful

      One of the remaining options like getting a UI designer to design your UI.

    9. Re:Yes! by elrous0 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I wish there were a "mod to infinity" option. If there were, I would give it to you.

      Too many programmers think of a UI like some needless accessory (or worse yet, think *they* know how to design a great UI, which usually leads to disaster). This is why so many open source apps have such godawful UI's. GIMP, Blender, etc. have a lot of great work under the hood, from a lot of very dedicated and skilled programmers. Too bad they've traditionally been buried beneath a *horrid* UI that would have made Steve Jobs commit seppuku.

      Here's a tip. If your open source project is worth a bunch of programmers, it's worth at least one decent designer too.

      --
      SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
    10. Re:Yes! by tigersha · · Score: 4, Insightful

      How many times do you use a command line (or even see one) on any of these in normal use ...? ...about the same as in Windows ... i.e. never ...

      On my Mac i Use the command line every day, most of the time. I sometimes write word documents with a bash script (actually, using Word on a mac with data from a database is a Great way of publishing things, because someone who knows Word can do the final processing and layout).

      I use the command line on the Mac to do image processing and a lot of other things too. BUT I refuse to use Linux as a desktop GUI because they cannot even get a font to render priorly and because some things MUSt be done is a GUI and there are no good programs for that in Linux. If you can use a command line AND a Gui to do your work you will find a lot of productivity increase. And for that, MacOS/X is pretty much the only game in town.

      --
      The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
    11. Re:Yes! by olau · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Agreed. I've seen my share of beautiful but horrible usability-wise interfaces.

      Furthermore, it's a well known fact that even usability experts only have limited success in predicting the failures of real users with a given interface. And I think most real usability experts are in the analytical camp, knowing what to look for and how to setup a user test to deconstruct an interface, not actually designing new interfaces.

    12. Re:Yes! by masternerdguy · · Score: 4, Insightful

      You're kidding right? This guy just criticized everyone and then pushed ribbon as a case of excellent design. He went so far as to say that everything's faster with a GUI, and we all know that isn't true.

      --
      To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
    13. Re:Yes! by Anonymus · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I can't imagine how bad an ebook designed by artists/editors would turn out. 90% of designers still think the web is print, even the ones who grew up using the web. If artists were in charge, an eBook would be a 500mb PDF with rendered graphics of every page.

      What is needed is a modern typesetter profession, with a mix of design/UI sense and logical/programming skills, who can design "books" with various requirements that can be viewed on a multitude of devices with different sizes and capabilities, with minimal time invested in each individual book.

    14. Re:Yes! by rickb928 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      "Ribbon - Designed by programmers,"

      - Citation needed

      --
      deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
    15. Re:Yes! by arikol · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Not disagreeing here, just trying to add to what you are saying.

      Programmers aren't horrible people or anything, they've just spent a lot of time at becoming quite good at a specific skill. Artists and designers spend an equal amount of time becoming good at another skillset, and usability specialists spend the same time becoming good at understanding other stuff that faces the user.

      I don't really think that the problem is the fault of the programmers, but rather management. See, management seems to understand the process of creating something as only the mechanical part of the creation (hammering in the nails, writing the code, making the pictures) and completely miss the complexity of coming up with a good design to begin with, as well as the iterative nature of most good design (usually only partly successful on the first try). This is just the mentality of managers, mostly old-school managers who still think that all problems can be solved by engineering and manufacture (or the equivalent).

      Most programmers that I know are fully aware of the fact that their skills at making usable interfaces are very limited, as is their knowledge of colour theory and such (the domain of the graphic designer). I am painfully aware that although I can perform a mean usability analysis, my skill at programming is limited to "hello world" levels. Okay, some graphic designers think that usability is simple and they can do it based on artistic insight (they usually state this just before creating some usability nightmare).
      Management then stops the programmer from implementing the solutions proposed by the usability experts as that takes resources away from making the nuts and bolts and says something like "we will fix that at the end of the project", resulting in a really clever but unusable product that requires a few months of fixing all the little details at the end...which is too much work, so it just gets shipped like that. Surprise, surprise, nobody wants to pay for it.

      Editors for text, artists for art, usability experts for usability, programmers for programming, and managers who have a clue about this all. Please?

    16. Re:Yes! by wootcat · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It's not a designer you need. There are plenty of UI designers who prioritize form over function. To really get a simple, workable, clean UI you need a usability expert who is going to take the time to design a front end that streamlines the functionality and ease of use for the end users. It's not easy, but with the proper prototyping and testing, any UI can be improved.

      It's sad to see the current state of eBooks. There is so much potential there, features and possibilities which are as yet untapped.

      --
      I'm really a low 5-digit Slashdotter, but this ID is where I am now.
    17. Re:Yes! by BetterSense · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Or, the GUI tools aren't that bad, but the change the goddam things every couple months. The file managers, window behaviors, drag-and-drop behaviorss, where the links are located, the menu layouts...it all changes, even within the same distro, over a time span of years. Compare that to XP which has been the same for 10+ years. So when I use Linux, I use the command line a lot...at least they don't change that (too much).

      My wife: honey, how I do "X"?
      me: "remembers how he did that 3 years ago, but now every fucking thing in the GUI is different, the buttons are on the opposite side of the window, the menus are completely different, the network manager is completely different, the sound system is new, and the program I used to use no longer seems to exist anymore"
      me: says "fuck it" and uses the command line.

    18. Re:Yes! by mwvdlee · · Score: 4, Insightful

      You mean a "usability expert". UI designers make things pretty, usability experts make sure the user never notices the pretty things.
      Usability requires boring (anything that draws unneeded attention is bad) and efficient, which simply isn't something many open source contributers want to do.

      --
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    19. Re:Yes! by joebok · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I apologize for unloading on you, but you've just hit a major peeve.

      I am a programmer. I recognize that Graphic/UI design is a separate skill from programming. The problem is, often I get handed a project with no UI specs. I always point it out (because I am sick and tired of the "programmers are poor designers shit") but no resources are assigned - so people end up with what I think is a good idea.

      The root cause is not your perceived programmer hubris, it is the cheapness of the upper levels setting project budgets. The thing about programmers is that good programmers are excellent problem solvers - so you can ask us to do anything - and it will get done - some things better than others.

      Oh, and you will find that programmers are the most logical people around - it is the rest of you that are irrational.

    20. Re:Yes! by T.E.D. · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Personally, I don't believe in design by focus groups. If you want a horrible design where a million confusing badly-designed functions are all crammed into one page/screen, then a focus group is the way to go.

      Users are really good at knowing what annoys them, but they generally don't understand what the good available solutions are. As a consequence, they will invariably insist on slight tweaks to the way they have always done things, and that every new function gets added to their favorite screen, page, or menu. The end result is invariably the UI equivalent of the worst spaghetti-code hacks.

      A really good design requires someone with the insight to see what the basic problems to be addressed are, what all the available tools are on your platform to solve such problems, and to design the entire system around that. No committe will ever be capable of that feat.

      What you need to take from users is what tasks they need done, and how they are used to doing them. The design then needs to be created by a designer, who has the insight to see what could be made easier for them, and will generally act as their advocate. This is the one thing I felt Steve Jobs always got right.

    21. Re:Yes! by quintus_horatius · · Score: 3, Insightful

      How was this modded "insightful"? There's no insight here, It's so bad it isn't even wrong.

      ...but I'm pretty sure the groups of people who are extremely artistically deficient and who program are not correlated in any strong way.

      I hope you're kidding. Most artists that I know are not particularly technical. Most of the programmers I know are not particularly artistic. Creative, yes, they're both creative activities. The theory of multiple intelligences holds, but the two paths rarely seem to cross.

      Linux is difficult to use because of the command line problem

      What command line problem? My pre-teen children use Linux, and they don't touch a command line. Ever. I use Linux and I use the command line frequently, but I don't see it as a "problem" but as a path to efficiency, both in creating interfaces (I can create a command-line app much faster than a GIU-based app) and getting my work done (I can restart Apache from a command line in half the time that I can restart IIS by navigating through the GIU). Show me the problem.

      Linux is a hodge podge of software that need not work well together.

      And a windows system with any third-party database or web server, or a set of third-party domain administration tools is... what, exactly? A hodge-podge. I would wager that a system running IIS or MSSQL is equally a hodgepodge under the hood, but the branding is more consistent.

      user space stuff isn't tested with rigor to work 100% of the time like kernel mode stuff

      Citation desperately needed. I think that several million long-term Apache installations on various Linux, Unix, and Windows servers would beg to differ.

      But overall, as a programmer, I do take offense to not knowing how to design a UI.

      Why? I have my areas of expertise. I'm not offended that someone understands a discipline better than I do and I take their inputs with gratitude.

      I know perfectly well how to.

      I have worked with people like you. You don't know nearly as well as you think you do. Sure, you may be able to design an interface perfect for you, but creating something that works well for everybody is an art that few people master. I think your "theory" about design is a bit too pat and self-serving.

    22. Re:Yes! by Catbeller · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Programmers also think they know how to name things as well. The... GIMP? Really? Try to explain to your employer that you want everyone in the department to use the GIMP to edit images. Then you can try to bring in the GNONORREA, RTARD, and MYBYTCH office suite components, all really well built - with names designed to send you to sensitivity training and a fine permanent billet in the data entry department (if they don't fire you outright).

    23. Re:Yes! by Hatta · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Linux is easier to use, because you can set it up in whatever way you find easiest to use. If you like the command line, then Windows is actually harder to use than Linux. If you like virtual desktops, Windows is harder to use than Linux. If you like to automate your workflow, Windows is harder to use than Linux.

      --
      Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
    24. Re:Yes! by HornWumpus · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Most of the 'artists' I know aren't particularly 'artistic'. They just self apply the label as a lifelong excuse for being fuckups.

      --
      John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
    25. Re:Yes! by Solandri · · Score: 4, Insightful

      While sometimes true, it is far more commonly a failure to understand the user. The ability to evaluate the usability of an interface, not just based on how it fits your needs, but on how it would fit someone else's needs is rare and requires a good bit of cultivating.

      No, this is mischaracterizing the problem. The problem isn't that people fail to understand "the user". The problem is that people think there is a single entity called "the user" whom they can design to satisfy. Programmers think "the user" is like them, so they make a UI which suits themselves. Designers think "the user" is like them, so they make a very different UI which suits themselves. Then they argue with each other about how they are right and the other is wrong. TFA is just another volley in this pointless war of blame.

      The reality is that there is no single "the user". Users come in all different shapes and sizes. Some like ribbons, others like menus, and others still like command lines. If you design your UI to placate one of these types of users, you will alienate the others. The holy grail of a single UI which everyone likes is unattainable, so we shouldn't even bother trying.

      Instead, I think the best way to approach UI design is like the presets for your car seat. Each user can customize the position of their car seat exactly how they like, and store it in a preset. But a different user can customize the seat they way they like, and store it in a different preset. In a similar way, I think UIs should come with several standard default presets - ribbon mode, menu mode, etc. You can pick the type of UI you want, tweak some elements if you prefer them different than the default, and save it as your own UI preset. That way when you work on your computer, the UI is to your liking. But if someone else borrows your computer, instead of getting all confused by your UI customizations, they can just click on one of the default presets (or load their own preset which they're carrying on their USB stick) and use something more comfortable to them. Microsoft has kinda done this with Windows 7. The file explorer interface is button-centric. But if you hit alt, the old menus appear.

      In publishing space, designers and publishers are worse offenders than programmers. Look back at the history of HTML. When Tim Berners-Lee (a programmer) first came up with HTML, it was completely user-centric. The only thing the author got to "design" what text and pictures to include. The author had zero control over how it would be displayed on the user's screen - that was controlled entirely by the user (or rather, the user's browser).

      Designers and publishers didn't like this. They (rightfully) wanted certain formatting, like the amount of indent at the beginning of a paragraph, to be consistent. So HTML was gradually extended to allow you to "hard-code" certain types of formatting. But then designers started to go overboard, insisting that their web page appear as similar as possible on every user's screen. Trying to view a web page on an 800x600 laptop screen? Too bad, the page is optimized for 1024x768, and I'm not going to let you change it to fit in your display. The ultimate culmination of this was the flash website. Where the menus, pages, pictures, were all coded in flash instead of in HTML, so that the site looked exactly as the designer wanted on every display, regardless of how well or how poorly the design worked on your particular display.

      So HTML (or rather, HTML/flash) in its short history has spanned both extremes. Zero author control and total user control, to total author control and zero user control. And has now settled on CSS which gives lots of author control, but with the right tools (e.g. firebug) offers lots of user control. A site I visited insisted on formatting the text as centered, so I just modified the CSS in firebug to display it as left justified. (This example only covers pub

  2. Cost-cutting by tripleevenfall · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Cost-cutting by realsilly · · Score: 3, Insightful

      It goes beyond simple cost cutting measures. Project managers don't really see the benefit of good artistic design and layout. It is rare indeed that a programmer has the artistic eye for design and are a great programmer. They do exist, and those that are really great at what they do have set a precedent of sorts. As managers try to find cost cutting measures that still provide a product worth selling, but if the manager doesn't have an artistic sense then that manager will hold little to no value in a designer. They don't see value added work. But the reality is quite the opposite. A great design can help sell a product because it is visually pleasing to the eye.

      Look at banking web pages for example, they are designed pretty nicely and are very functional.

      --
      Life takes interesting turns, but the most interest is when you're off the beaten path.
  3. No, the reason why is in the summary by neokushan · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Most publishers don't care about the iPad or eBooks very much

    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
  4. Management failure by plopez · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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+
  5. You want to replace ebooks with apps? by Patron · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I prefer my ebooks as .epub, thank you very much.

  6. No by donscarletti · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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
    1. Re:No by centuren · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      I was getting ready to proclaim this the most off-topic Slashdot discussion ever, then I finally saw mention this mention of typography. Yes, there are more further down, but I'm already burnt out on all this UI and usability talk. The article is about eBooks, not readers or tablets and especially not desktop environments or word processors. When reading a book, UI and usability don't come into it -- those things are already fixed into the platform on which I'm reading the book.

  7. Re:LaTeX by tehcyder · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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)

    Software can't turn you into a great designer any more than it can turn you into a great programmer.

    --
    To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
  8. terrible by SolusSD · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Well, most programmers are terrible at everything- including programming. That said, most people are terrible at what they do. :P

  9. Re:It's not just ebooks by Thantik · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I really hate when I see a term like "Plauger's spectrum", go to find the definition of it, and the only use of it ever, is right here on Slashdot with no explanation of what it is anywhere else...

  10. No! by DdKL · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  11. problems with LaTeX and e-books by infernalC · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  12. "Given"? by Bob9113 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    '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
  13. Tell me where you find "just works". by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.".

  14. Fixing my eBooks by Frightened_Turtle · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

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    Whew! This water sure is cold!
  15. Re:Amusing by _0xd0ad · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I find it amusing that the article linked for this story has some atrocious typography of its own.

    No, that's just what happens when you let an artist choose the typography rather than a programmer. They want you to appreciate the article as art, not process it as information. You don't "read" it, you "experience" it.

  16. careful what you wish for by bcrowell · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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!

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