3 ms·
By way of contrast, I want an e-reader which: - will allow organizing the books _exactly_ was I want (why isn't by percentage read an option, or chronological
by WillAdams 2y ago
By way of contrast, I want an e-reader which:
- will allow organizing the books _exactly_ was I want (why isn't by percentage read an option, or chronological by date of publication, or timeframe covered)
- allow flipping through pages of a text quickly with a re-draw/re-fresh rate which actually allows reading individual words as I turn pages quickly searching for a specific passage
- allow for a high-quality, detailed reproduction of an image, either in incredibly high resolution with subtle details (like to a printing of a b/w engraving with two black plates) or in full colour (and for extended colour range there was Hexachrome which I wish had become more popular)
- have the same contrast as a piece of paper w/ bright white paper under UV light, or even a Kelmscott Press edition (which has the blackest ink I've ever seen)
- allow _beautiful_ typesetting and will not allow widows and orphans and stacks to occur (in a re-flowable format --- no fair claiming PDFs are ebooks when folks sneer at them as not being ebooks, or presenting a collection of pixel images in a wrapper as an ebook)
Bonus points if the text is actually correct --- I've never read an ebook in which I did not report at least one typo (and that includes _Dune_ ("pogrom" was rendered as "program" and there was an error in the formatting of a glossary entry in the edition which I re-read) --- that said, the ability to directly report errors is nice, and fai r easier than tracking down the editor of a given volume at a given publisher (which reminds me, I need to check for an updated copy of _The Fall of Arthur_ by J.R.R. Tolkien to see if the typo I reported has been corrected).
The world would be a better place if authors would take typos as seriously as Donald E. Knuth does and give out reward checks (I have a physical one for $2.88 for his _Digital Typography_ --- and need to find a typo in a more recent work so as to have an account at the Bank of the Island of San Serriffe).
- falcolas 2y agoBeing fair, I've never found a paper book without at least one typo either. Hell, I accidentally bought a paperback on sale that had the last 100 pages replaced with another copy of the previous 100 pages.
- WillAdams 2y agoPrinted books, esp. older ones had a lot more constraints (print deadline) and don't have the same ability to update the master copy and push the corrections out --- there isn't an excuse for a book which has been continuously in print since 1965 still having a typo in it decades after it was first released as an ebook. In my experience print editors are far more receptive of being informed of errors than ebook editors --- often an ebook seems not to have had an editor at all, certainly no one proofread the copy of _Space Cadet_ I bought on the Sony ebook store for my Sony PRS-505 --- it was so rife with errors as to be unreadable, and required that I borrow a print edition from a local library so as to be able to send in the corrections.
- HKH2 2y agoI agree with your points; ebooks are not perfect. Thank goodness the flaws you've listed can be fixed.
- WillAdams 2y agoNot fixed yet. The typesetting issue (no orphans, widows, or stacks) in particular is quite intractable (Knuth wasn't able to come up with a hyphenation algorithm which detects and prevents stacks, see the 2nd edition of _The LaTeX Companion_).