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. ...
Sunday, June 27, 2010
Brilliant Essay by Craig Mod Concerning eBook Page Design
Thursday, June 24, 2010
Apple - Typographical Fashionistas
Designers of ebooks are starting to grumble about Apple's policy of locking down which fonts can be used on its iBooks platform.
Apparently iBooks 1.1 won't recognize fonts applied with standard CSS to any body, p, div, or span element.
Apple's guidelines say that designers choosing their own fonts would lead to "a bad user experience," a claim which some are calling shortsighted.
Liz Castro from the enigmatically-named Pigs, Gourds and Wikis says that Apple is messing with the ePub standards it purports to support and tells the Cupertino company: "Your desire for control will ultimately break these standards or it will break iBooks. It will break standards as it incites designers to use ugly hacks to overcome iBooks' broken support for standards. It will break iBooks as people design beautiful standards-compliant ebooks that look great in other readers ...
On the other hand, too many font options will make for chaos across the boards in eBooks publishing, if we are not careful. Perhaps Apple is on to something, although they lose points - as usual - for their heavy-handedness.