4 ms·

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 deci

by 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)?

by gizmo 15y ago

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)?