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?"
(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.
That's why I always use Comic Sans :)
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+
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.
I prefer my ebooks as .epub, thank you very much.
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.
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.
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
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...
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
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.
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.
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.
'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
One of the remaining options like getting a UI designer to design your UI.
One of the remaining options like getting a UI designer to design your UI.
Mmm, Unity and Gnome 3.
Letting 'UI designers' design UIs has been a freaking disaster, because they always seem to pick shiny over usability.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
"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)."
"Ribbon - Designed by programmers,"
- Citation needed
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
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?
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.
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?
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.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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).
But Nintendo somehow managed to make it socially acceptable to announce that you're going home to play with your Wii.
Exactly. My son started using Linux at about 18 months, and did his first install a week after his 2nd birthday. Given that he didn't learn to read until just before he turned 3, I think it is safe to say that there is no 'command line problem'.
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