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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.
The programmer is probably just as pissed as the user. Imagine designing an ebook format with built in dynamic page breaks, line breaks, columns, tabs, etc so the text can reform on-the-fly for different aspect ratios and text sizes while maintaining formatting. Now imaging the publisher insists of just hitting enter 20 times between chapters and formatting columns by pressing the space bar a lot each line.
What makes you think programmers are doing the eBook version, they already have the text in electronic format, they just get the Office lackey to use a quick and dirty program to turn it into an eBook ...
The issue is that no-one is writing a program to convert into the eBook formats that cares about typesetting ...
Puteulanus fenestra mortis
You're really setting yourself up for flaming, you know. You bring up a valid point but your method is so abrasive that few people will listen to you.
Yes, design is, in fact, a thing many people don't understand however design can make or break a product, and I wish more people who are on the left-side of their brains would realize that. We perhaps don't realize it but subconsciously we prefer more aesthetically pleasing interfaces/media/etc to ones that are uninspired. At least I do.
Anyhow, GUI's aren't always easier to use and the command line is the superior tool for some things because of one thing: it is explicit. Commands do exactly what you tell them to do, there is no guesstimation. Yes, a button is either pressed or not but you have to aim your pointer at the button :-). I can type "ps auwx | grep python" without having to move my wrist about the GUI and thus it can be quicker in some cases. Add in tab-completion and "remembering commands" is trivial.
This whole learning curve rubbish is just that, rubbish. I remember teaching my 9 year old cousin how to use a PC (she never had used one before). It didn't come "naturally" to her, she had to learn it as something new. Newsflash: buttons and switches didn't exist in nature! Saying that somehow we prefer GUIs by some a priori preference is silly. We find these familiar because buttons and switches are things we have learned to be used to from physical analogs like light switches but the "preference" stops there. There is one pre-computer analog to the command line and I bet my socks that it is more second nature(or first!) than switches: speech.
There is a reason people still use the command line and it isn't because of some cult of computer geeks that keep it going; it actually is quite useable.
They are different, you cannot really compare the speeds. doing many things by command line simply takes a lot of typing and clicking can be quite fast.
Also the gui does a far better job of stopping the user from looking up how to do things and customization, both of which can waste a lot of time.
And I don't care who you are, either you have every single command memorized (with every single argument as well) and you have wasted, probably months of your life learning these things or more likely just know some small subset and have to look up news ones on occasion.
Every second spent learning how to use a computer and customizing a computer is wasted, and if it can be trimmed down with a better interface then you have just created a better interface.
So the answer: After tens years of practice, uncountable hours (probably closer to days or weeks in some cases) reading man pages, and a similar amount of time creating custom scripts I can now use my computer 25% faster then GUI users (as long as I only do normal every day tasks) is not a shining recommendation for the command line.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
If it's your job to use computers efficiently and effectively, or have to access servers remotely via a shell, that can be quite useful.
But what do I know? It's not like we extensively use computers that need maintenance. We all know that managing large institutional networks is exactly just like using MS word on our personal PCs.
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
Spot on. The truth of this becomes apparent when you're reading ebooks that are straight conversions to PDF or ePub. No programmers were directly involved in the conversion, yet these books are often rife with typographical glitches and lexical errors that are clearly the result of OCR errors being incorrectly fixed by the spelling checker. This sloppiness is particularly common in ebooks of older publications, even those from reputable publishers.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
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.
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Regards
Maybe developers are more selfless about devoting their time to FOSS projects than designers/UI people.
The most obvious example of the Ribbon is Office.
Which I think is a bad example for *anything* UI related. Mostly because office software is so ridiculously crufty that the only way to make it more usable is by offering *less* features.
Firefox does pretty well with the ribbon. what's going to get me off FF isn't the ribbon.
(Hey Moz, fix the damn memory leaks!)
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
This entire article seems to be yet another case of "design guys can't be bothered" and "management isn't interested".
It's a management failure and there's really no need to slander programmers.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Actually, I'm a programmer with only a little recent learning of usability and design. At least I can admit that I do programming good, but I can't design or think about usability that much.
Well, Linux is NOT Unix. It does, however, implement a Unix-like environment, but it is not itself Unix. For that, it would have to be certified as a Unix.
OSX is certified as a Unix, and therefore is Unix. iOS, not sure - possible, but not necessarily.
Android is Linux, and as Linux is not Unix, neither is Android; and Android just goes to show that you put a nice GUI on top of Linux and everyone can use it. The main thing holding Linux back from the mainstream has been the inferior quality of the GUIs and expectation that old software continues to run but most people (not necessarily companies - most anyone that grew up in the 1980's and later has been primarily in a monoculture for computers - namely Windows on x86).
Linux doesn't require that a command-line interface be present (see Android). It's just that most Linux users find a command-line to be extremely useful as well - even when they run Windows or Mac. Yes, I use the command-line on every platform I utilize (except Android since it doesn't have one); I also typically install GnuWin32 on Windows systems so I can get a somewhat functional Windows environment (no, powershell doesn't cut it).
I've also introduced a number of people to Linux+KDE - most recently my computer illiterate dad. He won't ever touch the command-line; but he's quite happily now using Linux.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)