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.

Website Hosting — Reliable! Cheap! Fast! Right?

We all take website hosting for granted. Quick — where is your website’s server located? California? Australia? Sorry, “The Cloud” isn’t a valid answer. The location shouldn’t matter as long as the bits keep flowing to your website’s visitors. But when a site slows, or worse, fails to load, you’re surprised, perplexed, and with each passing hour, scared. How do you fix a problem you don’t understand, on a server you can’t access, at a location that might as well be Area 51?

Let’s prevent that, shall we?

First, you need a website, or you’re having one redesigned and you need new hosting. What kind? Do not base your decision on storage space, bandwidth, and “guarantees.” The far more important decision is in choosing Shared Hosting or Dedicated Hosting for your website.

A shared hosting server delivers files for dozens, even hundreds, of other websites all coexisting on one machine. When one or more of those web sites suddenly receives a deluge of traffic because of the kitten-playing-piano video they posted on their site, or hogs the server’s resources with some poorly written code, or is being attacked by an ailurophobic hacker, your site’s performance suffers. Sometimes it’s enough to take down your website. A shared server in this state is like a rowboat with too many occupants. Down it goes. If you don’t mind getting soaked during down times, shared hosting isn’t a problem. And for $20/month or less, we’re asking to tread water now and then.

Let’s look at Dedicated Hosting. This is the speedboat that comes alongside to pull you from the water. When only a few sites are on a server, you’ll find better uptime, faster speeds and fewer hosting headaches. Your database server is only processing your requests. It’s all about you. For this you can expect to pay about $50/month. That’s far less than your daily Starbucks. Do we have clients that choose Shared Hosting? You betcha. Do they have issues? You betcha.

So we’ve chosen (dedicated) hosting, right? Is that all we need to do? Almost. We need to be vigilant about your site’s uptime and speed. When you see a drop in performance or a period of downtime, contact your hosting provider posthaste. Don’t assume the provider knows about the issue. At Copy & Design we use a monitoring service (separate from our hosting providers) to monitor our websites and those of our clients. They check the websites from a worldwide network of computers, every day, every sixty seconds. This gives us an accurate picture of how well a server is performing and lets us troubleshoot issues before our client or their audience is adversely affected. It all sounds time-consuming and technical—and it is, on the provider’s side. For us, it just means receiving an e-mail that a site is down. We can then contact our hosting provider if the problem continues. For this service we pay about half as much as the hosting.

So, have a website monitoring service notify you when your site is down. And choose dedicated hosting from a provider who will be responsive to your requests. Hosting still have you flummoxed? Don’t want to even think about hosting? If you’re a Copy & Design client, we’ll hook you up with a hosting package through Joyent, MediaTemple or Pingdom that meets your needs and that we’ll manage from the beginning. It’s the speedboat that not only pulls you out of the water, but offers you a towel and a hot chocolate and reassures you that everything will be fine.

CMS (See A Mess)

Con•tent man•age•ment sys•tem | kənˈtent ˈmanijmənt sistəm
noun
1 a web app that provides an editor with tools to update a website : You’re grabbling lunch? Sure I’ll come. Let me just add a couple photos and a new blog entry using our swell content management system. I’ll be done in a minute.
2. an arcane, overwhelmingly complicated array of options, administration screens and impossible-to-remember steps that make one wish to have chosen alpaca breeder over marketing director as a career. Lunch? Can’t make it. I have to add a couple #*%@#^! photos and a #*%@#^! blog entry using our #*%@#^! content management system.

Features. We love them. We love them in our cars, our stoves, our printers and phones — wait. Do we really love them? Ninety percent of the buttons on your microwave have likely never been touched, and the other ten only hesitantly.

Here at Copy & Design, we love how putting the right Content Management System in a client’s hands can result in a fresh, useful website. But we don’t like bloat and unnecessary features that confound and confuse our clients. In fact, we don’t care for the term content management system, especially the initialism CMS. So let’s call it what it really is: A content manager. And let’s talk about what it needs to do.

A content manager should make it easy to keep the content on a website up to date. Think adding a blog entry, removing a past event, or posting some new photos to a gallery. Content. And, a content manager, like a website, should also be customized for the audience using it. You’re a novice? Then it should have clear built-in help next to every field. Need (not want) more power? Then we’ll add a few (just a few) additional options.

But if you really want a CMS with built-in mailing list management, form creation, payment processing and more, then we’ll kindly recommend another agency. Because a content manager is about content. And a mailing list manager is about mailing lists. And a form manager is about forms. We don’t want to build clients the all-in-one fax/copier/scanner with a hundred options and a thick manual. We want to build websites that your visitors enjoy browsing and that, when it’s time to update, you can manage without dread. Because the features you use are the only features you need. And, besides, it’s time for lunch.

E-books: The Great Leveler

In the 1990s, websites were seen as an opportunity for unpublished, agent-less writers to gain an audience. But reading on a computer monitor, even reading the most finely crafted online PDF, couldn’t — and still can’t — compare to enjoying a hardcover or paperback book. Then, as now, the disparity wasn’t solely because many writers’ websites looked like crap, both in screen resolution and design. Nor even the incessant scrolling and clicking and twitchy index finger after long reading sessions. It was, and remains, the keyboard. With a keyboard between the reader and the on-screen reading material, we’re reminded — whether reading slouched in front of a fixed computer desk, or even more supine with a laptop singeing one’s legs — that we’re on a machine meant for labor. A writer’s machine, not a reader’s.

Understanding this, many independent writers have moved to print-on-demand to more closely approximate professionally published books. But that’s not the answer and it doesn’t level the playing field. Most attempts at print-on-demand books by individuals, except for those who have employed a professional to design and typeset a book, might as well have AMATEUR written across the cover. In Comic Sans. (And they sometimes do.) And print-on-demand titles aren’t, for the most part, going to be found in your local bookstore.

The great leveler between publishers and self-publishers isn’t websites or PDFs, or print-on-demand books. It’s e-books, and for three main reasons.

First, there are the devices: Kindle, iPad, iPhone, Nook, Sony Reader and Android phones and tablets. They’re small, lightweight, and inexpensive, with screen resolutions rivaling print. (True, the Kindle has keys, but they’re nearly vestigial.) Battery life exceeds the hours we can read in a day. They’re in our pocket, our purse, our hand, and in our gaze.

Then there are the online bookstores which are open to any writer, some even without an ISBN, including Amazon’s Kindle Store, Apple’s iBooks and Barnes & Nobles’ Nook store. An analogy of this equalization in the print world would be if self-published writers could enter their nearest bookstore and set up a stack of their novels on the New Releases table.

Technology firms have created the devices and the infrastructure for obtaining content and paying writers, but it’s the adoption of the e-book by major publishers that is the most important factor for the independent publisher and small press. It’s no longer hardcover vs an amateur website. It’s an e-book vs an e-book, the same file formats on the same devices. It’s content vs content.