Make yourself comfortable. Hang out for a while. And see what the web looks like from our point of view.
Let’s Improve The State Of E-books
Yes, e-books pale compared to the triumph that is the paperback. If the aim of a reading medium is to disappear as completely as possible, leaving the reader immersed in the content, then nothing surpasses a paperback. The paperback book weighs less than a hardcover book, lacks the distraction of both the cover dust jacket and the superfluous deckled edge of a hardcover, and is fairly malleable. There is text, then a border of unprinted paper, then the world beyond, pleasantly out of focus as we read. There is no electron-consuming device. There are no distractions.
The benefits of the printed book aside, e-books are hobbled not so much by their file formats, reading devices, or online stores — though all could use improvement — but by the lack of care given to e-book design. As with any typo in print, an error in an e-book remains there for everyone who’s made a purchase. Yet publishers continue to release editions with startlingly slipshod production and authors continue to use cut-rate services that produce poor quality work.
Readers of e-books deserve quality.
It’s fine for a publisher to scan a book and apply OCR software to translate the scan into text. But the final text must be thoroughly proofread and compared with the original text. We’ve seen publishing houses release major texts where not a single screen was free of a typo or illegibly spelled word. Egregious typos aside, many publishers seem to also suffer amnesia when it comes to laying out e-books, ignoring, among other basic elements of good typography, proper text spacing and paragraph indenting. Hold an e-book up to its print counterpart to see all that’s missing at the price of legibility.
Bring back craftsmanship.
E-books are, for the most part, HTML and style sheet files. With a solid knowledge of HTML we can turn the clotted mess of many computer-generated e-books into legible, immersive texts. But it takes more than technical savvy to produce an inviting text. It takes an appreciation for legibility. The half-assed production of many current e-books and back catalog books means publishers will have to rework their first forays into e-books — unless we don’t care. Unless we allow mediocrity to be acceptable when there’s no technical reason it needs to be. But we do care, right? For $9, $10, even $12 bucks we should be angry. We should take advantage of return policies (Amazon’s is seven days, by the way) on subpar e-books and complain to publishers. We should rate these e-books on online stores to warn potential buyers.
So, let’s bring back craftsmanship. Let’s establish vigorous testing methods involving multiple e-book devices and multiple proofreaders. Take the time to do it right. One page at a time. Double-check your work. Make it neat. Grade-school advice.
Authors — it’s your work.
E-book device manufacturers provide the means, publishers provide the mess, and readers pay for mediocrity. What role, then for the author? No one has more interest in the quality of an e-book than the book’s author. They need to request e-book proofs in all major formats and check them on their end, page by page, just as they would galleys for a printed book. They need to pester publishers to fix errors in current e-books. If an author is putting out a book themselves, they need to take just as much care into its production, including hiring diligent e-book packagers, proofreaders, and device testers. It can be expensive, but book production is expensive. Remember that e-books only save printing costs, not the time and care it takes to lay out a book.
Be true to the medium
There’s lots to like about e-books, though, for all sides involved. There’s ease of distribution for authors and publishers, and integrated features like word definitions and tangential trips to Wikipedia, for readers. So let’s not pretend e-books are a limiting medium that can afford to ignore good typography and essential proofreading. And let’s stop pretending e-books are print books. E-books are not printed on acid-free paper. So why state that on the copyright page of a typical e-book, along with other inapplicable information like where it’s printed? This only instills the notion that readers haven’t purchased the real thing. The real thing is the content, not what it’s distributed on. E-books don’t need the blank pages a print book does to keep dedications, titles and sections on the right side of the book. So let’s omit those. E-books seem harder to flip through, so let’s add the internal structure that’ll let us skip ahead by chapter or section at a touch — a feature that’s available right now but availed by so few publishers.
These deficiencies in e-books are hardly insurmountable. They can all be made today if publishers, packagers and authors will take the time to educate themselves and hire people who are dedicated to their craft. Let’s all care so we can get back to reading and enjoying great books, whatever their format.
