18 ms·

Ebooks, you’re doing it wrong

121 points by barredo 15y ago

gizmo 15y ago
I can't stand ebook typography either. Almost half the kindle ebooks I buy are formatted so poorly I can't read them. It's a combination of awful technical decisions and very lazy typesetting. Awful technical decisions such as: text justification and margins are fixed and inconsistent, spacing between words is awful, footnotes break the "navigate to last page" feature, pictures show up in the wrong place, tables look awful, charts and diagrams are full of jpeg compression artifacts) and so on. It's really infuriating. Nowadays I check all 1-star and 2-star reviews for mention of "ebook" or "kindle". That usually keeps me from making a bad purchase. With the combination of lousy typesetting and comparatively high prices amazon really shows contempt for their customers.
- rubergly 15y ago
  I really don't think you can blame Amazon for the high prices of ebooks. From the publisher's perspective, ebook prices are disastrously low. There does seem to be quite a bit of inconsistency on the part of the publishers, though. They complain that ebooks are destroying their business models, and then restrict Amazon and other retailers to charge comparable prices for ebooks, but they don't treat ebooks comparably themselves. Ignoring the fact that releasing an ebook doesn't require physical printing and the multitude of material and labor costs associated with that, they don't seem to apply the same editorial (and typographic) effort that they do with printed books.
  - ToastOpt 15y ago
    Yeah, the publishers are mourning the loss of "hardcover edition" in the ebook format. That's where they make their mint. I'm hoping that they will try (and catch on) a ebook+hardcover release model. After all, people buy hardcover either (a) because they need the product now and can't wait for paperback (or there isn't one), or (b) because they also want to show it off in their personal library. The ebook+paperback could offer that experience. Hardcover $30, Hardcover+ebook $33. That's $3 for free. Oh, hmm, looks like O'Reilly is already is doing this bit :-) A month after each new release, you make paperback and ebook available simultaneously, offering the ebook at minus publishing and shipping costs. ($5 paperback, $3 ebook?)
- dfc 15y ago
  "Almost half the kindle ebooks I buy are formatted so poorly I can't (sic) read them." Honestly? I think the typesetting is quite awful too but it has not interfered with my ability to parse the words on the screen. I really wish that the typesetting was better but I am not sure if this is something that we will see any time soon. Can you imagine running latex on the kindle cpu everytime you flipped a page? On the other hand the ebook files would be huge if you prerendering all of the pages. You would have to prerender a separate page starting at every "location" and in each font size. That is an enormous number of combinations.
  - wtallis 15y ago
    I haven't used a recent Kindle, but the original eInk screens were slow enough that the tablet most certainly could have run TeX on the next page in the time it took to clear the screen.
    - dfc 15y ago
      Do you have benchmarks for running a tex engine on a tablet CPU? Everytime this topic comes upo on comp.tex the consensus seems to be that tablets are not yet capable of running tex on the fly.
      - wtallis 15y ago
        Are tablet CPUs fast enough? Probably not for a whole book, but for a single chapter? Almost certainly. And if you eschew the features of XeTeX or LuaTeX and just stick with pdfTeX, things could be very quick: For the example I posted elsewhere in this thread of typesetting a novel in 30s with XeLaTeX, pdfTeX does it in about 6s. A single chapter (32k of text): 0.8s, and I/O bound at that. Even if a tablet's 800Mhz Cortex A8 does that 5 times slower than my Core 2, it's fast enough to be done speculatively. It's certainly no slower than loading a web page over the internet.
        dfc 15y ago
        Is the single chapter time with all of the modern typographic features the main article is about or without them (pdftex)?
8ig8 15y ago
It comes down to resources and throwing them at the highest return. For all the people complaining about typography in ebooks, if they were indeed hand set for the new format, you'd have people complaining that certain books aren't available in an electronic format fast enough. It's impossible to please everyone.
- larrik 15y ago
  Nonsense. It is months between when the physical book is typeset and it hits the stores. Plenty of time to tweak the ebook version.
  - capnrefsmmat 15y ago
    Surely the majority of the typesetting would be done by the e-reader software itself, anyway. Hyphenation, justification, and spacing can be handled almost entirely in software, except perhaps hints for strange words or difficult situations. LaTeX can certainly handle it without help, at least.
    - 8ig8 15y ago
      I agree, but in this post, the author says: > With a little effort, the makers of The Publisher’s digital incarnation could have one-upped the printed book by positioning these photographs to accompany relevant bits of Brinkley’s text, illustrating, e.g., a description of Henry Luce’s childhood with a photo of Luce as a toddler. I don't know anything about typesetting, but this specific example seems difficult to automate with software. A human would need to decide where best to place these photos. Again, a guess, but it seems that this book started life in a pre-electronic book production process. To get it right would require more manual effort for the e-book. Just like websites are evolving to be adaptive/responsive, I think book production will follow. We're just not there yet. Websites are still being launched today that are close to impossible to read on a mobile phone.
      - wtallis 15y ago
        In LaTeX, switching between putting all the figures on their own page or putting them inline takes the equivalent of an #ifdef. It's really easy, and doesn't require any special knowledge of typesetting. Remember, TeX started out with the goal of being able to automate the typesetting of a very large, very complicated multi-volume book (The Art of Computer Programming). Novels are almost too easy, and adding a few pictures to a biography is mostly trivial.
bhickey 15y ago
To deal with this issue I've taken a few Gutenberg texts, converted them to LaTex and then rendered then into PDFs designed for my reader (nook Simple Touch). It's laborious, but it looks great.
- maxerickson 15y ago
  Have you looked at GutenMark? (It purports to take the work out of Gutenberg->Latex->PDF; I've not used it, simply had it buried in the back of my head somewhere)
  - docgnome 15y ago
    I took a look and it seems to work well enough... I'm not sure how well what it does would translate to an e-reader.
- Luyt 15y ago
  My eBook reader renders plain flat TXT files pretty good, and in the font and fontsize I can specify myself (instead of having to look at some poor choices made by someone else for a PDF). With that in mind, I convert the Gutenberg etexts to a textual format my eBook will show nicely (joining sentences to paragraphs etc), see http://www.michielovertoom.com/python/gutenberg-ebook-scraping/ http://www.michielovertoom.com/python/gutenberg-ebook-scrapi... , source on https://github.com/motoom/gutenberg-ebook-scraping https://github.com/motoom/gutenberg-ebook-scraping
reaganing 15y ago
I've come across a number of Kindle eBooks with numerous typos or other errors. It's like they simply OCR'd a printed book and didn't bother to check for issues ('Too Big to Fail' by Andrew Ross Sorkin is the most egregious I've bought). Many of these books are eventually corrected and Amazon will email letting you know this so you can get an updated copy, but this has generally been months, or years[1], after I've put up with the problems and finished reading the book. And it would be nice if pictures were handled better. I think ideally they should all be put at the end of the eBook but have links in the text that take you to the relevant picture, so you can quickly look at it and hit "back" to go back to the text where you left of. [1]: Just this morning, I got an email from Amazon telling me a book I purchased in May 2009 has been updated with corrections.
- dfc 15y ago
  Your suggestion to put images at the end creates the same problem that footnotes do. Namely it breaks sync to last page read. The author of the linked post laments this very problem.
slipperyp 15y ago
Yawn, this old saw? Despite the fact that every person who cares about this has a blog where they complain about it, the market is indicating pretty clearly that this is not so important that it needs to be solved today. I'm sure this will get better over time and I suppose posts from people like this will help motivate it, but don't we all get it by now? Recalibrate your expectations a little - buying an ebook is a lot like buying a physical book, but it's not the same thing. Maybe I should start blogging about how unhappy I am with the portability of physical books or how I was in an airport and wanted to rip the first chapter out of a book in the store to read on the plane but the store owner TOTALLY wouldn't let me!
- marquis 15y ago
  Until a publisher comes along who takes the effort to present eBooks properly, grabs a big share of the market and others follow suit. (see: iPhone for an example of how manufacturers take note of selling trends).
  - slipperyp 15y ago
    What I'm saying is that I'm not convinced that this would move a significant chunk of the market. I could be totally wrong but my impression is that this is a lot more like the a gold rush with all parties scrambling to lock in business with the factors that are most compelling to potential customers and I believe those factors are things like selection, platform cost, and maybe other functionality of the device. Whether the fonts are beautiful or whether the books are rendered with more than one style of the "-" glyph is probably somewhere like priority #153. Which is NOT to say that I disagree that it matters. I just expect it's going to get better, because the platform / technology is relatively immature. And I think it matters a lot less today than people who blog about things like this (or those who downvote dissenting comments about things like this rather than trying to be persuasive) might think.
    - marquis 15y ago
      Sure, you're probably right about vendors trying get lock-in, that makes sense. I'm personally curious about what premium we'll end up paying for physical books, like how CDs are no longer the primary music delivery mechanism yet music lovers pay a premium for vinyl.
mjschultz 15y ago
I don't have a Kindle or other ebook reader, so I can't speak from experience but are some publishers better than others? I mean, there are many very bad physical book publishers out there that don't (or minimally) edit the copy sent to them before sending it to the presses. That translates into the digital realm too, but there is a much lower barrier for entry for bad publishers and it's hard to differentiate between bad and good publishers in these early days. If no publisher out there is doing a good job, it might be something to invest time into and maybe make some money.
wtallis 15y ago
Typesetting a longish (~800k plain text) novel using XeLaTeX and the microtype package takes my 2Ghz CPU about 30 seconds, and produces a 1.8MB PDF. Current tablets should be able to re-render an individual chapter in a second or two, and it would not be any trouble for ebook distributors like B&N and Amazon to pre-render portrait and landscape versions at several different type sizes. Fixing the abysmal typography of ebooks really wouldn't take much work, and would probably be the best thing ebook publishers could do to woo serious book-lovers who aren't also geeks. Why aren't they even trying?
- pak 15y ago
  I'm with you; I think ebooks should be distributed in some variant of XeLaTeX and rendered using its toolchain. You retain the structure and can change the size of the text, font, etc. as the user desires. It would be leaps and bounds better than the current level of typography you see on the iPad and Kindle. The only thing I can think of is that normal people, even book-lovers, don't care. We have been trained by reading webpages so much of the time that we have low standards. But the sad thing is, ebooks generally have worse typography than your average blog post read in a typical web browser. I'm looking at you, iBooks. Jesus.
  - dfc 15y ago
    XeLaTeX? Why do you prefer xelatex over lualatex? I would be interested in hearing if you actually had any concrete reasons for your preference.
    - pak 15y ago
      Hmm, I had no need for the programming additions in LuaTeX; my main concern was using UTF-8 and having better integration between LaTeX and my system fonts. XeLaTeX offers a great out-of-the-box experience for using commercial, "pro" fonts, particularly on a Mac; check out the 'fontspec' package. However, I've heard the LuaTeX can do microtypography really nicely, and I haven't checked if they've made using system fonts easier, so maybe it's work a second look. There is a beta 'microtype' package for XeTeX but it doesn't have all the features that LuaTeX has (font expansion?).
canes123456 15y ago
The only way we will get good ebooks is if publisher make the book for HTML/ePub first. They can than export for the page size they are printing and tweak it. They will not put in the work on an already created book to make it re-sizable.
brnstz 15y ago
I've read a lot of non-technical books on the Kindle app for iPhone, and I haven't noticed any serious flaws. Generally I find the experience to be extremely pleasant, particularly compared to random PDFs I've tried to read through iBooks. Perhaps this is more of a problem with books with different typesetting for code vs. prose, etc?
- slipperyp 15y ago
  FWIW, I agree most prose works great and think you're right that the technical book experience is where it's most clearly lacking (not being able to quickly flip to an appendix or back / forth 5 pages is a big annoyance of mine). There are ways I think it works poorly for prose, though, too. The most obvious example to me is the George RR Martin Fire & Ice books. When I'm reading those, I very frequently want to flip from a section of the book to the maps of the world described in the book. I read a physical copy of the first two books but went to Kindle (both the 3rd generation Kindle and Android app) for the third and it's tedious to set a book mark, navigate to marks and notes, find the map, and then navigate back to the bookmark. Additionally, the map images in the ebook are of such low quality that they are nearly unreadable. Lastly, there's an appendix of the families represented in these books at the back (who's who). When reading the first two books, I often would consult that, too, but once I'd done that with the Kindle book, it made it really painful to switch back and forth between reading on my phone vs. my kindle, because the "sync" function is "sync to furthest page read" - which is at the end of the book, not my current place in the book. All of the above gripes with that book would be plain to see for anyone who bothered trying to read the book on a kindle - and it should be obvious to the kindle team that "sync to furthest page read" breaks when a book has an appendix / index or something that readers are likely to consult.
  - brnstz 15y ago
    Interesting you mention Fire & Ice, I read the first three primarily on Kindle for iPhone. I did get into the habit of bookmarking my current page to reference the maps and appendix. Generally my biggest problem with "sync to furthest page read" was reading while underground (subway). Usually I just fire up the iPhone briefly so it will sync forward if I want to read on a different device. There is also the "Book Extras" section which, for Ice & Fire, includes content from Shelfari with some appendix info and does not break the furthest page read. It would be nice if the official appendix and maps were included in a similar format.
acabal 15y ago
Agreed--not just typography but in many cases the entire ebook experience is just terrible. Some works are very clearly just OCR'd from the print version, with no proofreading done (you can tell if you're reading one if you spot an obviously out-of-place word that would still pass a spellcheck). Others may be mostly presentable, but retain their print ephemera--for example, hyphenation in the middle of a paragraph, because there was a line break in the print version at that point. It's not always the publisher's fault--I've developed a few ebooks for different platforms, and ebook readers today are where Mozilla and IE were around the IE5 browser wars. Developing a book that looks good across all platforms is difficult, if not impossible in some cases. It wouldn't suck so much if we weren't paying almost the same price as a print book. Why would I pay ~$13 for a brand-new, often terrible-quality ebook (and a DRM'd one at that), when I could buy two print books for the same price, and get Amazon to ship them free to my door?
- slipperyp 15y ago
  For the convenience of being able to carry it on your phone, make highlights and notes that you can search in the future, for the ability (if you're interested in it) of finding information about passages others who've read the same book found most interesting, for the ability to "loan" the book to a relative or friend in a distant state without having to send the book through the mail. I'm not trying to say you're wrong or that I even disagree, I'm just trying to point out that people should have different expectations with ebooks and physical books (like I mentioned in my other post which was downvoted). ebooks are awesome in some ways physical books are not (and they're lousy in some ways that they really oughtn't be). The point I most strongly agree on is where you say this is in its infancy (like the browsers wars). The first ebook I read was on a Windows PocketPC in about 2000 and it sucked. The whole technology has gotten dramatically better and I expect it will continue to, but it's not more than about 10 years old, really, and only really started gathering steam within about the past 5 years. And I'm not saying "therefore we should all have low expectations" but I, personally, am willing to look at all the things that have been done well and focus more on those than focusing on typography or whether editing is immediately correct.
  - deleted 15y ago
azov 15y ago
Think of it in context. A few short years ago nobody had e-readers because books that people wanted were not available, and nobody cared to publish books in electronic format because nobody owned e-readers. That's why Amazon and others had to come up with fast and cheap ways to scan thousands of paper books. There was not enough sales to pay for adapting each title for the new format, but prices for ebooks had to be high enough so that ebooks weren't jeopardizing paper book sales (otherwise publishers won't agree to have them scanned). Of course it's unfortunate that consumers are now left with sub-par product, but I think it was necessary to get the ecosystem going. Beautiful typography and ebook-appropriate formatting will get there, just give it a little time.
pasbesoin 15y ago
If my Kobo would just (word)wrap code samples in ePubs, I'd be happy. It lets them run off the right edge, with no control to horizontally scroll to see the rest (awkward as that would be). I guess once I grok ePub a bit better, I can editing the texts to change the code samples' formatting. Also annoying: It will landscape PDF's, but not ePubs. /grump
TheCowboy 15y ago
Thomas, it would be nice if you could zoom properly and have the font-size adjust on your blog. (Using Chrome)
natch 15y ago
There are two issues here. The author doesn't really seem to care about distinguishing them, so I will: 1) Shitty rendering engines used in (some) ebook readers. If the ebook original has an em dash and it's being converted and displayed as hyphens, that's just bad rendering. Same thing if it has two hyphens together in a prose text context surrounded by spaces, and it's not being shown as an em dash, bad. 2) ebooks that start out bad. In this case, it's garbage in, garbage out. For this, the blame goes to the publishers, as he correctly noted. Has anyone done side by side comparisons of the same books, from the same publishers (I'm not talking about Gutenberg books that may have been converted using differing technologies, but major publishers), on different ebook readers from different companies?
kleiba 15y ago
I think there's a parallel to hacking though. On our weekend projects, our babies, our github projects we're most proud of, we like to make sure that we get it right: clean code, beautiful abstractions, efficient implementation, etc -- because we, as hackers, get a kick out of that. We have a gut feeling what is the right way to write a certain program. Like a painter knows where to draw the next line. ...but does that mean that we do the same in our day to day jobs? The code that you have to fire out to meet next Friday's deadline? The program that will make it into the next product that needs to hit the market now? I'd bet almost all of us know the feeling of, "ah, if only I had a little more time, I know exactly how to code this the way it should be". But this is business so (a) the time you need just isn't there and (b) what the heck, you don't care as much about the accounting app your company sells anyway. So, yes, I'm sure that ebook publishers aren't idiots. And they know that ebooks can be done differently from printed books. But they are businessmen, too, and so the question is always: will doing these changes give them more profit? That is, will the additional costs of e.g. moving the glossy-paper pictures from a central position directly to the parts of the books that refer to them result in more sales? Or sales at a higher price? I figure if the answer were yes, the publishers would do it. But as long as they get away with sloppy editing and one-to-one copies of paper prints, why would they? The additional costs are not material costs, but that people have to sit down and make these edits. And that's not just one guy spending half a day to do that.
- tutysara 15y ago
  this should change when many people start telling how they would have liked the ebook version more if it would have been polished a bit, most of the time business think they are doing fine unless someone complains or bring these difficulty to their attention. this will also change when more and more people are opting ebook version to the printed copy. as of now the printed copy sells more compared to ebook format AFAIK and the ebook format is catching up fast for the many convenience stated in the posts here. We can expect a change soon as many people are getting ebooks and raising their concerns. this could also change when some really nice product(device or software) to read ebooks comes to the market, I dream of a ebook reader where I can annotate, mark and make notes using a stylus like device. while many of these features are available in the ebook readers today they don't give the same feel as using a printed copy, for example (making handwritten notes)
Freestyler_3 15y ago
"I just scan books, I don't get paid for that." I can hear it. Meanwhile someone is rubbing his hands (or should I say wallet) and tells people that they are now available on ebooks.
johnnyn 15y ago
You have to understand the publishing industry to understand why eBooks fail so terribly in design and typography. Most publishers could care less about the eBook format. They still have this idealistic vision that eBooks will die off. Publishers are truly idiots. I work for a startup in the digital book space and we get so many ePubs that do not meet standards and are formatted incorrectly. We end up having to hack our code to cater to each publisher. Some publishers are better than others but most of them honestly do not care about eBooks.
rbanffy 15y ago
Am I the only on perfectly happy with the epub files O'Reilly makes? Also, when you are talking about ebooks, shouldn't things like font selection be left for the reader (the being, not the machine) to decide?
- viraptor 15y ago
  I'd be glad with a nice default (chosen by publisher) that can be changed. Technical books are usually using different font than novels, than cookbooks, than children stories, ...
  - rbanffy 15y ago
    Sure, but the styling has to be semantic or it will end up breaking. I am not sure most non-technical authors even know what the "style" drop-down does on their word processors.
illumen 15y ago
I've been working on an Ebook for a while now, and it is quite hard. So I'm not surprised that many books have bad typography. Our ebook is for the open source/FOSS project PyGame. http://www.pygamezine.com/ http://www.pygamezine.com/ PyGameZine is in Beta, and we're launching today. We made the book in html, and converted that into PDFs. The process was quite hard over all. Haven't started on the process of turning it into an EPUB yet.
- adrianN 15y ago
  Why did you choose HTML over something like DocBook that makes it easy to convert it to other formats?
  - illumen 15y ago
    That probably would have been a saner way to go. However, we felt that authors would find html easier to write, and designers would find it easier to design in. Maybe something like restructured text would have been ok to do too. Since it is a python magazine, and many python programmers would know restructured text. If we make it to another issue, we might think about using a separate toolchain.
zokier 15y ago
Many people are complaining about Kindle e-books here. Are eg. B&N ebooks any better or worse?
kbatten 15y ago
I've read a lot of ebooks (even long before I got a kindle) and I have to say that I read them for the story, not the presentation. What is wrong with ebooks is that there are still books that I _cannot_ buy. I want to give the publishers/writers my money and they simply will not accept it. For me its e or nothing, I don't have the space to store paper books, and to be honest I just like ebooks better.
eisa01 15y ago
If we're going to get a stop to this, people must complain and demand their money back. I did so with one book I bought from Amazon, were some words consistently had spaces inserted into them e.g. "carry ing".
- waqf 15y ago
  I just cut out the middleman and don't buy ebooks in the first place. Less effort, same result.
gbog 15y ago
I find it strange that such a complaint about typography is done on a web-page I have hard time reading with my Chrome. The font is too small, and trying to enlarge it make the column narrower but the font size stay the same. When selecting text has some weird contours. There are some CSS tricks behind this, I guess. They seem to imply that the author is not fully aware of the number 1 rule of typography: it must be done according to the medium. Books and newspapers don't have the same typographic rules. The web have other rules. Ebooks probably have other yet-to-be-invented rules. But I agree with the claim: most of the books I have read on my Kindle have bad typography. It should be fixed on two sides: The reader's software can be improved[1], and ebooks have to be proofread and adapted to this medium. [1] Oh I wish Amazon could iterate on the Kindle (I mean the real one, with e-ink), improve its reader software, its browser, etc., instead of running after iPad's success.
tnicola 15y ago
I am quite passionate about this and my husband and I are trying to fix it. If you want to be kept in the loop http://www.pixelpublish.com http://www.pixelpublish.com I write popular fiction right into Tex and use pdflatex to typeset my books. But that is also not a solution. As error proof as it is, it is rather cumbersome and not very user friendly. The problem of (most) of today'e ebooks is not that they are typeset in Word, but that they are converted from Word. Contrary to common sense, authors' write (produce text) in Word (WYSIWYG editor -- not text) and then they upload their .doc files into epub creators to produce epubs (text). Yes, we go from text to text via something that isn't text. Bound to be a few glitches. Word has hidden commands that an average user cannot anticipate unless they are surgically careful with their formatting. Most of today's epublishers have written an entire book length instructions on how to do this error free. It's exhausting. In my opinion, writing, as a process, must be revolutionized for this to be fixed.
obtino 15y ago
This is the reason that I choose buy O'reilly e-books from the O'reilly website. They are the only publisher (that I know of) who puts in the effort to make typography in their e-books beautiful.

121 points by barredo 15y ago

gizmo 15y ago

I can't stand ebook typography either. Almost half the kindle ebooks I buy are formatted so poorly I can't read them. It's a combination of awful technical decisions and very lazy typesetting. Awful technical decisions such as: text justification and margins are fixed and inconsistent, spacing between words is awful, footnotes break the "navigate to last page" feature, pictures show up in the wrong place, tables look awful, charts and diagrams are full of jpeg compression artifacts) and so on. It's really infuriating. Nowadays I check all 1-star and 2-star reviews for mention of "ebook" or "kindle". That usually keeps me from making a bad purchase. With the combination of lousy typesetting and comparatively high prices amazon really shows contempt for their customers.

rubergly 15y ago
I really don't think you can blame Amazon for the high prices of ebooks. From the publisher's perspective, ebook prices are disastrously low. There does seem to be quite a bit of inconsistency on the part of the publishers, though. They complain that ebooks are destroying their business models, and then restrict Amazon and other retailers to charge comparable prices for ebooks, but they don't treat ebooks comparably themselves. Ignoring the fact that releasing an ebook doesn't require physical printing and the multitude of material and labor costs associated with that, they don't seem to apply the same editorial (and typographic) effort that they do with printed books.
- ToastOpt 15y ago
  Yeah, the publishers are mourning the loss of "hardcover edition" in the ebook format. That's where they make their mint. I'm hoping that they will try (and catch on) a ebook+hardcover release model. After all, people buy hardcover either (a) because they need the product now and can't wait for paperback (or there isn't one), or (b) because they also want to show it off in their personal library. The ebook+paperback could offer that experience. Hardcover $30, Hardcover+ebook $33. That's $3 for free. Oh, hmm, looks like O'Reilly is already is doing this bit :-) A month after each new release, you make paperback and ebook available simultaneously, offering the ebook at minus publishing and shipping costs. ($5 paperback, $3 ebook?)
dfc 15y ago
"Almost half the kindle ebooks I buy are formatted so poorly I can't (sic) read them." Honestly? I think the typesetting is quite awful too but it has not interfered with my ability to parse the words on the screen. I really wish that the typesetting was better but I am not sure if this is something that we will see any time soon. Can you imagine running latex on the kindle cpu everytime you flipped a page? On the other hand the ebook files would be huge if you prerendering all of the pages. You would have to prerender a separate page starting at every "location" and in each font size. That is an enormous number of combinations.
- wtallis 15y ago
  I haven't used a recent Kindle, but the original eInk screens were slow enough that the tablet most certainly could have run TeX on the next page in the time it took to clear the screen.
  - dfc 15y ago
    Do you have benchmarks for running a tex engine on a tablet CPU? Everytime this topic comes upo on comp.tex the consensus seems to be that tablets are not yet capable of running tex on the fly.
    - wtallis 15y ago
      Are tablet CPUs fast enough? Probably not for a whole book, but for a single chapter? Almost certainly. And if you eschew the features of XeTeX or LuaTeX and just stick with pdfTeX, things could be very quick: For the example I posted elsewhere in this thread of typesetting a novel in 30s with XeLaTeX, pdfTeX does it in about 6s. A single chapter (32k of text): 0.8s, and I/O bound at that. Even if a tablet's 800Mhz Cortex A8 does that 5 times slower than my Core 2, it's fast enough to be done speculatively. It's certainly no slower than loading a web page over the internet.
      - dfc 15y ago
        Is the single chapter time with all of the modern typographic features the main article is about or without them (pdftex)?

8ig8 15y ago

It comes down to resources and throwing them at the highest return. For all the people complaining about typography in ebooks, if they were indeed hand set for the new format, you'd have people complaining that certain books aren't available in an electronic format fast enough. It's impossible to please everyone.

larrik 15y ago
Nonsense. It is months between when the physical book is typeset and it hits the stores. Plenty of time to tweak the ebook version.
- capnrefsmmat 15y ago
  Surely the majority of the typesetting would be done by the e-reader software itself, anyway. Hyphenation, justification, and spacing can be handled almost entirely in software, except perhaps hints for strange words or difficult situations. LaTeX can certainly handle it without help, at least.
  - 8ig8 15y ago
    I agree, but in this post, the author says: > With a little effort, the makers of The Publisher’s digital incarnation could have one-upped the printed book by positioning these photographs to accompany relevant bits of Brinkley’s text, illustrating, e.g., a description of Henry Luce’s childhood with a photo of Luce as a toddler. I don't know anything about typesetting, but this specific example seems difficult to automate with software. A human would need to decide where best to place these photos. Again, a guess, but it seems that this book started life in a pre-electronic book production process. To get it right would require more manual effort for the e-book. Just like websites are evolving to be adaptive/responsive, I think book production will follow. We're just not there yet. Websites are still being launched today that are close to impossible to read on a mobile phone.
    - wtallis 15y ago
      In LaTeX, switching between putting all the figures on their own page or putting them inline takes the equivalent of an #ifdef. It's really easy, and doesn't require any special knowledge of typesetting. Remember, TeX started out with the goal of being able to automate the typesetting of a very large, very complicated multi-volume book (The Art of Computer Programming). Novels are almost too easy, and adding a few pictures to a biography is mostly trivial.

bhickey 15y ago

To deal with this issue I've taken a few Gutenberg texts, converted them to LaTex and then rendered then into PDFs designed for my reader (nook Simple Touch). It's laborious, but it looks great.

maxerickson 15y ago
Have you looked at GutenMark? (It purports to take the work out of Gutenberg->Latex->PDF; I've not used it, simply had it buried in the back of my head somewhere)
- docgnome 15y ago
  I took a look and it seems to work well enough... I'm not sure how well what it does would translate to an e-reader.
Luyt 15y ago
My eBook reader renders plain flat TXT files pretty good, and in the font and fontsize I can specify myself (instead of having to look at some poor choices made by someone else for a PDF). With that in mind, I convert the Gutenberg etexts to a textual format my eBook will show nicely (joining sentences to paragraphs etc), see http://www.michielovertoom.com/python/gutenberg-ebook-scraping/ http://www.michielovertoom.com/python/gutenberg-ebook-scrapi... , source on https://github.com/motoom/gutenberg-ebook-scraping https://github.com/motoom/gutenberg-ebook-scraping

reaganing 15y ago

I've come across a number of Kindle eBooks with numerous typos or other errors. It's like they simply OCR'd a printed book and didn't bother to check for issues ('Too Big to Fail' by Andrew Ross Sorkin is the most egregious I've bought). Many of these books are eventually corrected and Amazon will email letting you know this so you can get an updated copy, but this has generally been months, or years[1], after I've put up with the problems and finished reading the book. And it would be nice if pictures were handled better. I think ideally they should all be put at the end of the eBook but have links in the text that take you to the relevant picture, so you can quickly look at it and hit "back" to go back to the text where you left of. [1]: Just this morning, I got an email from Amazon telling me a book I purchased in May 2009 has been updated with corrections.

dfc 15y ago
Your suggestion to put images at the end creates the same problem that footnotes do. Namely it breaks sync to last page read. The author of the linked post laments this very problem.

slipperyp 15y ago

Yawn, this old saw? Despite the fact that every person who cares about this has a blog where they complain about it, the market is indicating pretty clearly that this is not so important that it needs to be solved today. I'm sure this will get better over time and I suppose posts from people like this will help motivate it, but don't we all get it by now? Recalibrate your expectations a little - buying an ebook is a lot like buying a physical book, but it's not the same thing. Maybe I should start blogging about how unhappy I am with the portability of physical books or how I was in an airport and wanted to rip the first chapter out of a book in the store to read on the plane but the store owner TOTALLY wouldn't let me!

marquis 15y ago
Until a publisher comes along who takes the effort to present eBooks properly, grabs a big share of the market and others follow suit. (see: iPhone for an example of how manufacturers take note of selling trends).
- slipperyp 15y ago
  What I'm saying is that I'm not convinced that this would move a significant chunk of the market. I could be totally wrong but my impression is that this is a lot more like the a gold rush with all parties scrambling to lock in business with the factors that are most compelling to potential customers and I believe those factors are things like selection, platform cost, and maybe other functionality of the device. Whether the fonts are beautiful or whether the books are rendered with more than one style of the "-" glyph is probably somewhere like priority #153. Which is NOT to say that I disagree that it matters. I just expect it's going to get better, because the platform / technology is relatively immature. And I think it matters a lot less today than people who blog about things like this (or those who downvote dissenting comments about things like this rather than trying to be persuasive) might think.
  - marquis 15y ago
    Sure, you're probably right about vendors trying get lock-in, that makes sense. I'm personally curious about what premium we'll end up paying for physical books, like how CDs are no longer the primary music delivery mechanism yet music lovers pay a premium for vinyl.

mjschultz 15y ago

I don't have a Kindle or other ebook reader, so I can't speak from experience but are some publishers better than others? I mean, there are many very bad physical book publishers out there that don't (or minimally) edit the copy sent to them before sending it to the presses. That translates into the digital realm too, but there is a much lower barrier for entry for bad publishers and it's hard to differentiate between bad and good publishers in these early days. If no publisher out there is doing a good job, it might be something to invest time into and maybe make some money.

wtallis 15y ago

Typesetting a longish (~800k plain text) novel using XeLaTeX and the microtype package takes my 2Ghz CPU about 30 seconds, and produces a 1.8MB PDF. Current tablets should be able to re-render an individual chapter in a second or two, and it would not be any trouble for ebook distributors like B&N and Amazon to pre-render portrait and landscape versions at several different type sizes. Fixing the abysmal typography of ebooks really wouldn't take much work, and would probably be the best thing ebook publishers could do to woo serious book-lovers who aren't also geeks. Why aren't they even trying?

pak 15y ago
I'm with you; I think ebooks should be distributed in some variant of XeLaTeX and rendered using its toolchain. You retain the structure and can change the size of the text, font, etc. as the user desires. It would be leaps and bounds better than the current level of typography you see on the iPad and Kindle. The only thing I can think of is that normal people, even book-lovers, don't care. We have been trained by reading webpages so much of the time that we have low standards. But the sad thing is, ebooks generally have worse typography than your average blog post read in a typical web browser. I'm looking at you, iBooks. Jesus.
- dfc 15y ago
  XeLaTeX? Why do you prefer xelatex over lualatex? I would be interested in hearing if you actually had any concrete reasons for your preference.
  - pak 15y ago
    Hmm, I had no need for the programming additions in LuaTeX; my main concern was using UTF-8 and having better integration between LaTeX and my system fonts. XeLaTeX offers a great out-of-the-box experience for using commercial, "pro" fonts, particularly on a Mac; check out the 'fontspec' package. However, I've heard the LuaTeX can do microtypography really nicely, and I haven't checked if they've made using system fonts easier, so maybe it's work a second look. There is a beta 'microtype' package for XeTeX but it doesn't have all the features that LuaTeX has (font expansion?).

canes123456 15y ago

The only way we will get good ebooks is if publisher make the book for HTML/ePub first. They can than export for the page size they are printing and tweak it. They will not put in the work on an already created book to make it re-sizable.

brnstz 15y ago

I've read a lot of non-technical books on the Kindle app for iPhone, and I haven't noticed any serious flaws. Generally I find the experience to be extremely pleasant, particularly compared to random PDFs I've tried to read through iBooks. Perhaps this is more of a problem with books with different typesetting for code vs. prose, etc?

slipperyp 15y ago
FWIW, I agree most prose works great and think you're right that the technical book experience is where it's most clearly lacking (not being able to quickly flip to an appendix or back / forth 5 pages is a big annoyance of mine). There are ways I think it works poorly for prose, though, too. The most obvious example to me is the George RR Martin Fire & Ice books. When I'm reading those, I very frequently want to flip from a section of the book to the maps of the world described in the book. I read a physical copy of the first two books but went to Kindle (both the 3rd generation Kindle and Android app) for the third and it's tedious to set a book mark, navigate to marks and notes, find the map, and then navigate back to the bookmark. Additionally, the map images in the ebook are of such low quality that they are nearly unreadable. Lastly, there's an appendix of the families represented in these books at the back (who's who). When reading the first two books, I often would consult that, too, but once I'd done that with the Kindle book, it made it really painful to switch back and forth between reading on my phone vs. my kindle, because the "sync" function is "sync to furthest page read" - which is at the end of the book, not my current place in the book. All of the above gripes with that book would be plain to see for anyone who bothered trying to read the book on a kindle - and it should be obvious to the kindle team that "sync to furthest page read" breaks when a book has an appendix / index or something that readers are likely to consult.
- brnstz 15y ago
  Interesting you mention Fire & Ice, I read the first three primarily on Kindle for iPhone. I did get into the habit of bookmarking my current page to reference the maps and appendix. Generally my biggest problem with "sync to furthest page read" was reading while underground (subway). Usually I just fire up the iPhone briefly so it will sync forward if I want to read on a different device. There is also the "Book Extras" section which, for Ice & Fire, includes content from Shelfari with some appendix info and does not break the furthest page read. It would be nice if the official appendix and maps were included in a similar format.

acabal 15y ago

Agreed--not just typography but in many cases the entire ebook experience is just terrible. Some works are very clearly just OCR'd from the print version, with no proofreading done (you can tell if you're reading one if you spot an obviously out-of-place word that would still pass a spellcheck). Others may be mostly presentable, but retain their print ephemera--for example, hyphenation in the middle of a paragraph, because there was a line break in the print version at that point. It's not always the publisher's fault--I've developed a few ebooks for different platforms, and ebook readers today are where Mozilla and IE were around the IE5 browser wars. Developing a book that looks good across all platforms is difficult, if not impossible in some cases. It wouldn't suck so much if we weren't paying almost the same price as a print book. Why would I pay ~$13 for a brand-new, often terrible-quality ebook (and a DRM'd one at that), when I could buy two print books for the same price, and get Amazon to ship them free to my door?

slipperyp 15y ago
For the convenience of being able to carry it on your phone, make highlights and notes that you can search in the future, for the ability (if you're interested in it) of finding information about passages others who've read the same book found most interesting, for the ability to "loan" the book to a relative or friend in a distant state without having to send the book through the mail. I'm not trying to say you're wrong or that I even disagree, I'm just trying to point out that people should have different expectations with ebooks and physical books (like I mentioned in my other post which was downvoted). ebooks are awesome in some ways physical books are not (and they're lousy in some ways that they really oughtn't be). The point I most strongly agree on is where you say this is in its infancy (like the browsers wars). The first ebook I read was on a Windows PocketPC in about 2000 and it sucked. The whole technology has gotten dramatically better and I expect it will continue to, but it's not more than about 10 years old, really, and only really started gathering steam within about the past 5 years. And I'm not saying "therefore we should all have low expectations" but I, personally, am willing to look at all the things that have been done well and focus more on those than focusing on typography or whether editing is immediately correct.
- deleted 15y ago

azov 15y ago

Think of it in context. A few short years ago nobody had e-readers because books that people wanted were not available, and nobody cared to publish books in electronic format because nobody owned e-readers. That's why Amazon and others had to come up with fast and cheap ways to scan thousands of paper books. There was not enough sales to pay for adapting each title for the new format, but prices for ebooks had to be high enough so that ebooks weren't jeopardizing paper book sales (otherwise publishers won't agree to have them scanned). Of course it's unfortunate that consumers are now left with sub-par product, but I think it was necessary to get the ecosystem going. Beautiful typography and ebook-appropriate formatting will get there, just give it a little time.

pasbesoin 15y ago

If my Kobo would just (word)wrap code samples in ePubs, I'd be happy. It lets them run off the right edge, with no control to horizontally scroll to see the rest (awkward as that would be). I guess once I grok ePub a bit better, I can editing the texts to change the code samples' formatting. Also annoying: It will landscape PDF's, but not ePubs. /grump

TheCowboy 15y ago

Thomas, it would be nice if you could zoom properly and have the font-size adjust on your blog. (Using Chrome)

natch 15y ago

There are two issues here. The author doesn't really seem to care about distinguishing them, so I will: 1) Shitty rendering engines used in (some) ebook readers. If the ebook original has an em dash and it's being converted and displayed as hyphens, that's just bad rendering. Same thing if it has two hyphens together in a prose text context surrounded by spaces, and it's not being shown as an em dash, bad. 2) ebooks that start out bad. In this case, it's garbage in, garbage out. For this, the blame goes to the publishers, as he correctly noted. Has anyone done side by side comparisons of the same books, from the same publishers (I'm not talking about Gutenberg books that may have been converted using differing technologies, but major publishers), on different ebook readers from different companies?

kleiba 15y ago

I think there's a parallel to hacking though. On our weekend projects, our babies, our github projects we're most proud of, we like to make sure that we get it right: clean code, beautiful abstractions, efficient implementation, etc -- because we, as hackers, get a kick out of that. We have a gut feeling what is the right way to write a certain program. Like a painter knows where to draw the next line. ...but does that mean that we do the same in our day to day jobs? The code that you have to fire out to meet next Friday's deadline? The program that will make it into the next product that needs to hit the market now? I'd bet almost all of us know the feeling of, "ah, if only I had a little more time, I know exactly how to code this the way it should be". But this is business so (a) the time you need just isn't there and (b) what the heck, you don't care as much about the accounting app your company sells anyway. So, yes, I'm sure that ebook publishers aren't idiots. And they know that ebooks can be done differently from printed books. But they are businessmen, too, and so the question is always: will doing these changes give them more profit? That is, will the additional costs of e.g. moving the glossy-paper pictures from a central position directly to the parts of the books that refer to them result in more sales? Or sales at a higher price? I figure if the answer were yes, the publishers would do it. But as long as they get away with sloppy editing and one-to-one copies of paper prints, why would they? The additional costs are not material costs, but that people have to sit down and make these edits. And that's not just one guy spending half a day to do that.

tutysara 15y ago
this should change when many people start telling how they would have liked the ebook version more if it would have been polished a bit, most of the time business think they are doing fine unless someone complains or bring these difficulty to their attention. this will also change when more and more people are opting ebook version to the printed copy. as of now the printed copy sells more compared to ebook format AFAIK and the ebook format is catching up fast for the many convenience stated in the posts here. We can expect a change soon as many people are getting ebooks and raising their concerns. this could also change when some really nice product(device or software) to read ebooks comes to the market, I dream of a ebook reader where I can annotate, mark and make notes using a stylus like device. while many of these features are available in the ebook readers today they don't give the same feel as using a printed copy, for example (making handwritten notes)

Freestyler_3 15y ago

"I just scan books, I don't get paid for that." I can hear it. Meanwhile someone is rubbing his hands (or should I say wallet) and tells people that they are now available on ebooks.

johnnyn 15y ago

You have to understand the publishing industry to understand why eBooks fail so terribly in design and typography. Most publishers could care less about the eBook format. They still have this idealistic vision that eBooks will die off. Publishers are truly idiots. I work for a startup in the digital book space and we get so many ePubs that do not meet standards and are formatted incorrectly. We end up having to hack our code to cater to each publisher. Some publishers are better than others but most of them honestly do not care about eBooks.

rbanffy 15y ago

Am I the only on perfectly happy with the epub files O'Reilly makes? Also, when you are talking about ebooks, shouldn't things like font selection be left for the reader (the being, not the machine) to decide?

viraptor 15y ago
I'd be glad with a nice default (chosen by publisher) that can be changed. Technical books are usually using different font than novels, than cookbooks, than children stories, ...
- rbanffy 15y ago
  Sure, but the styling has to be semantic or it will end up breaking. I am not sure most non-technical authors even know what the "style" drop-down does on their word processors.

illumen 15y ago

I've been working on an Ebook for a while now, and it is quite hard. So I'm not surprised that many books have bad typography. Our ebook is for the open source/FOSS project PyGame. http://www.pygamezine.com/ http://www.pygamezine.com/ PyGameZine is in Beta, and we're launching today. We made the book in html, and converted that into PDFs. The process was quite hard over all. Haven't started on the process of turning it into an EPUB yet.

adrianN 15y ago
Why did you choose HTML over something like DocBook that makes it easy to convert it to other formats?
- illumen 15y ago
  That probably would have been a saner way to go. However, we felt that authors would find html easier to write, and designers would find it easier to design in. Maybe something like restructured text would have been ok to do too. Since it is a python magazine, and many python programmers would know restructured text. If we make it to another issue, we might think about using a separate toolchain.

zokier 15y ago

Many people are complaining about Kindle e-books here. Are eg. B&N ebooks any better or worse?

kbatten 15y ago

I've read a lot of ebooks (even long before I got a kindle) and I have to say that I read them for the story, not the presentation. What is wrong with ebooks is that there are still books that I _cannot_ buy. I want to give the publishers/writers my money and they simply will not accept it. For me its e or nothing, I don't have the space to store paper books, and to be honest I just like ebooks better.

eisa01 15y ago

If we're going to get a stop to this, people must complain and demand their money back. I did so with one book I bought from Amazon, were some words consistently had spaces inserted into them e.g. "carry ing".

waqf 15y ago
I just cut out the middleman and don't buy ebooks in the first place. Less effort, same result.

gbog 15y ago

I find it strange that such a complaint about typography is done on a web-page I have hard time reading with my Chrome. The font is too small, and trying to enlarge it make the column narrower but the font size stay the same. When selecting text has some weird contours. There are some CSS tricks behind this, I guess. They seem to imply that the author is not fully aware of the number 1 rule of typography: it must be done according to the medium. Books and newspapers don't have the same typographic rules. The web have other rules. Ebooks probably have other yet-to-be-invented rules. But I agree with the claim: most of the books I have read on my Kindle have bad typography. It should be fixed on two sides: The reader's software can be improved[1], and ebooks have to be proofread and adapted to this medium. [1] Oh I wish Amazon could iterate on the Kindle (I mean the real one, with e-ink), improve its reader software, its browser, etc., instead of running after iPad's success.

tnicola 15y ago

I am quite passionate about this and my husband and I are trying to fix it. If you want to be kept in the loop http://www.pixelpublish.com http://www.pixelpublish.com I write popular fiction right into Tex and use pdflatex to typeset my books. But that is also not a solution. As error proof as it is, it is rather cumbersome and not very user friendly. The problem of (most) of today'e ebooks is not that they are typeset in Word, but that they are converted from Word. Contrary to common sense, authors' write (produce text) in Word (WYSIWYG editor -- not text) and then they upload their .doc files into epub creators to produce epubs (text). Yes, we go from text to text via something that isn't text. Bound to be a few glitches. Word has hidden commands that an average user cannot anticipate unless they are surgically careful with their formatting. Most of today's epublishers have written an entire book length instructions on how to do this error free. It's exhausting. In my opinion, writing, as a process, must be revolutionized for this to be fixed.

obtino 15y ago

This is the reason that I choose buy O'reilly e-books from the O'reilly website. They are the only publisher (that I know of) who puts in the effort to make typography in their e-books beautiful.