Why Innovation Doffs an Old Hat

NY Times: "Just as the average human carries around the remnants of a prehistoric tail and a useless appendix, the tools we use also bear marks of the evolutionary process from which they arose. Add to that list Amazon’s e-reader, the Kindle, which will now supplement its 'location numbers' with page numbers that correspond to physical books. The change, announced last week, does have a practical purpose — especially for book clubs, whose digital readers presumably will no longer have trouble looking up the same page as analog readers. But there is also a sense of absurdity here. E-books, by definition, do not have pages. Depending on which size font someone uses, she may have to advance the screen many times before 'turning a page.' Then there are the questions of how to approach books with many physical editions, or texts that exist only in digital space. ... "

Page Numbers for Kindle Books an Imperfect Solution

But imperfect is all we can hope for - so says Dave Pogue in the NY Times.

Amazon adds "real" page numbers to Kindle eBooks

PC Pro:

... At the moment, Kindle eBooks show the percentage of a book a reader has finished, as well as the 'location' - usually a number reaching into the thousands.

Because the location number doesn't correspond with page numbers in physical printed copies of books, it makes it difficult to use the Kindle as part of classes or book groups.

"Our customers have told us they want real page numbers that match the page numbers in print books so they can easily reference and cite passages, and read alongside others in a book club or class," the company said in a post on the Kindle blog.

"Rather than add page numbers that don’t correspond to print books, which is how page numbers have been added to eBooks in the past, we’re adding real page numbers that correspond directly to a book’s print edition." ...

Design in Digital Publishing - It's Time

Jenn Webb, O'Reilly Radar: "Joshua Tallent [owner of eBook Architects] says it's time for eBook design to get the same attention as print design. ... "

Craig Mod on the Zen of Tablet Page Design

A List Apart: Articles: A Simpler Page:

The physical book is something designers get. It’s got a lot going for it, not the least of which is the fact that it’s physical. The boundaries are there, right before us. No guess work is necessary. And so there are a lot of great examples of well designed books. You needn’t look far to uncover a mountain of beautifully typeset and balanced pages.

But what about digital books?

Tablets are in many ways just like physical books—the screen has well defined boundaries and the optimal number of words per line doesn’t suddenly change on the screen. But in other ways, tablets are nothing like physical books—the text can extend in every direction, the type can change size. So how do we reconcile these similarities and differences? Where is the baseline for designers looking to produce beautiful, readable text on a tablet?

This essay looks to address these very questions. This essay also marks the release of an HTML baseline typography library for tablet reading. It’s currently iPad optimized. It’s called Bibliotype and the hope is for it to provide a solid base atop which we can explore. It’s very rudimentary, but rudimentary is a damn fine place to start. ...

Why Some E-books Just Don't Look Right

PW: "There are a couple of major issues that need to be dealt with if e-books are to approach print standards. Bud Parr, president of Sonnet Media, a Web design firm that has created Web sites for authors, presses, and organizations, who is beginning to expand his work from the Web to the e-book field, said, 'The technologies that are used to create e-books in EPub are wholly familiar [to me] as a Web developer and designer.' EPub uses the same style sheets, which 'give it its formatting and its visual life,' noted Parr. The main challenge in formatting e-books, according to Parr, is the way different Web-browsers—or, in this case, e-books, e-readers, and e-reading apps—interpret the code and style in an EPub file (Kindle, of course, has its own proprietary file format and style, and requires separate formatting). Because all the apps and devices work a little differently, the same file can look different in iBooks than it does in the Kobo app or on a Sony Reader. This is especially problematic with poetry or e-books with tables, visual elements, or a lot of tricky formatting: an indent, for example, might look right on one e-reader, but not indent enough on another, just because the two platforms are interpreting the same code differently."

Ideo Video: The Future of Digital Publishing?

The people at Ideo offer an interesting and well-produced video summarizing their vision for the future of the book. Meet Nelson, Coupland and Alice.

Book "Covers" in the Age of the eBook

From the O'Reilly TOC (Tools of Change for Publishing) blog, a thoughtful consideration by James Bridle: " ... [eBook covers] are not covers in any traditional sense: they have nothing to cover. They are icons. Signifiers. And more crucially, they're not there to sell the book directly; they are marketing material separated from the point-of-sale. Cover art only sells physical books. In an ideal world we would get rid of cover art altogether. This is probably what JD Salinger desired, in his refusal to countenance any imagery at all on his book covers ..."

Books in the Age of the iPad — Craig Mod

An important and artfully-crafted meditation by Craig Mod: "I want to look at where printed books stand in respect to digital publishing, why we historically haven't read long-form text on screens and how the iPad is wedging itself in the middle of everything. In doing so I think we can find the line in the sand to define when content should be printed or digitized. This is a conversation for books-makers, web-heads, content-creators, authors and designers. For people who love beautifully made things. And for the storytellers who are willing to take risks and want to consider the most appropriate shape and media for their yarns."

Poetry And eBooks: Will Poems Ever Work In eBook Formatting?

Hillel Italie addresses the question:

NEW YORK — Billy Collins, one of the country's most popular poets, had never seen his work in e-book form until he recently downloaded his latest collection on his Kindle.

He was unpleasantly surprised.

"I found that even in a very small font that if the original line is beyond a certain length, they will take the extra word and have it flush left on the screen, so that instead of a three-line stanza you actually have a four-line stanza. And that screws everything up," says Collins, a former U.S. poet laureate whose Ballistics came out in February. ...

Also check Travis Nichols on the topic of The eBook Ugly Stick.

Microsoft Patent for Page Turn Animation? And If So, Do We Care?

From the NYTimes.com Bits Blog:

On Thursday a tidbit of news circulated around the Web that Microsoft had filed a patent in late 2009 hoping to lay claim to the look and feel of page turns on a touchscreen device.

The patent states that when “one or more pages are displayed on a touch display” a “virtual page turn curls a lifted portion of the page to progressively reveal a back side of the page while progressively revealing a front side of a subsequent page.” Just like real pages in a paper book.

Many bloggers speculated that if Microsoft is awarded the patent for page turns, Apple would have to remove, or license, the interface technique it currently uses in its iBooks application.

But the page turn doesn’t necessarily make sense in digital form and seems to be an unnecessary and archaic carryover from print.

Of course many might disagree with me on this: it is a topic of debate among fans of user interface design and digital books.

Jason Kottke, blogger and Web designer, had this to say about the iBooks page turn:

The page flipping animation in the iBooks app though? Super cheesy. It’s like in the early days of cars where they built them to look like horse-drawn carriages. Can’t we just scroll?

Craig Mod, a book designer, also noted earlier this year that the page turn is something of a relic: “The metaphor of flipping pages already feels boring and forced on the iPhone.” ...

Brilliant Essay by Craig Mod Concerning eBook Page Design

Find it here.

It's a rainy Sunday afternoon and I'm sitting in a cafe in central Tokyo, desperately trying to enjoy a book on my iPad. Distractions abound: sloppy typography, misspelt words, confusing page breaks, widows, orphans, broken tables. These and more pull me from the narrative spell. In that moment I realize, although I've had this substantial object of glass and metal for a few weeks, I haven't managed more than ten pages of anything.

What, then, is the problem?

It's not the screen — I've happily read several novels on my iPhone.

It's not the weight — it feels fine when resting on a table or my knee.

The problem is much simpler: iBooks and Kindle.app are incompetent e-readers. They get in the way of the reading experience and treat digital books like poorly typeset PDFs.

We can do better. ...