E-Readers (Kindle, Nook, using iPad for reading) yay or nay

lol its funny he has a whole long update clearly inspired by people telling him hes an idiot where hes all yeah i know ebooks need to be readable on lots of different devices but what this blog post presupposes is what if they dont

Aye you're right, there's nothing wrong with text that flows to fit whatever device it's on. "Layout" beyond chapters and paragraphs just isn't an issue for 99% of books.

hes right that ebooks tend to lack the polish of printed matter, but his solution is just silly, and he doesnt even particularly identify the specific qualities of the problem, like there are a lot of people working really hard on this doggie, lol pdf

Well I don't know that things are that easy. I think there is a place for both a variable, scaleable, context-/device-dependent format and a locked-down, .pdfish model. (Although something a little more sturdy and robust than .pdf would be nice...). In other words, I can see, say, comic book geeks really liking to read things w/ certain well-defined dimensions and presentation standards, while most books/articles will be seved equally well by being read as 160 words on a b&w iphone screen as enlarged on a 27" monitor.

yeah obvs 'books' thatre primarily images have a whole nother set of demands

This issue is v. prominent in adaptive/assistive/instructional info techology, where the divide b/w 'image' and 'text' is pretty fuzzy.... somebody's gotta come up with something better than a .pdf to allow input and the preservation of precise, functional formatting that is somehow useable on more than one type of device. HTML5 isn't a bad option, frankly, but it'll need wider acceptance/support.

was just thinking abt ui design in adaptive/assistive technologies, not really something i know anything abt, but it seems p interesting

OK, so I guess I was understanding him to the extent that he was making sense.

But is flowing text "plug ugly"? It doesn't seem that way to me, a non-techy consumer.

its just 'people talkin abt fonts for no good reason' m/l

But is flowing text "plug ugly"? It doesn't seem that way to me, a non-techy consumer.

c/f images upthread

I meant, does it seem "plug ugly" to you, dear reader.

the problem with the crooked timber thing is that 'just use pdf!' is a ridiculously awful solution to the problem. but it's still a solution which would produce better looking results than the current paradigm

here's some text on the nook:

http://int64.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/badjustify.png

that's from an article which has the even better thesis at least if you have a nook you can dump your epubs into pdfs and redo the typesetting yourself and read that which i am guessing probably even more of a non-starter for most people

however i feel like this is right:

"My only real gripe is that, like al­most every other e-​read­er out there, it has such poor type­set­ting that you have to won­der if it was de­signed by soft­ware en­gi­neers who aren’t big read­ers"

which, you know, ding ding ding

xpost: yes.

I tried for like 5 minutes to be a typeface snob, but I realized that I don't detect any difference in value between similar typefaces. "Readability" is not an issue for me beyond actual illegibility.

Concur

it's not the typefaces so much as the spacing

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/content/binary/WindowsLiveWriter/AmazonKindlevs.KindleDXTheFinalWord_CE5C/screen_shot-35927_thumb.gif

lookit the paragraph starting "'Fangtasia,' Pam said" -- there's places where the gaps between words are larger than the words themselves -- now admittedly i. a small subset of people will care and ii. this appears to be from one of those true blood novels so w/e

i don't know, i assume the normal response is "why in the hell would that bother you" and then i say "you don't know it but it's crippling your reading experience" and then i turn into that guy who starts the dynamic range compression threads and refuse to go outside because i might hear some music that's not on my perfectly magnetically balanced insulated and feng shui-ed hi fi system

I honestly don't notice stuff like that, and I read a lot. That paragraph looks fine to me.

xxxp

I get distracted by weird spacing. I can push through it, but it will take me out of the reading headspace, if that makes any sense. Like, it will remind me that I'm reading, and it takes a minute to get back to where I am no longer aware of the process of translating words into brain images.

the main offense of that formatting is the that text is justified rather than aligned, aka itd be more readable were it jagged along the right margin

its p unconscionable tbqh, is there a setting for that or something

i mean its like a super easy fix

I don't know why all these things use whatever random just-above-MS-Word-quality line-breaking algorithms when they could be using something closer to the TeX line-breaking algorithms, which are pretty much the gold standard of doing this sort of thing automatically.

xps the Sookie Stackhouse novels are in first person? ick

having just said that, though, reading it in my head, that "'Fangtasia,' Pam said" did come out slower than it should have. So maybe I guess I do notice this stuff.

xp to myself

I like the ability to change the font for each book I read. The more "formal" the book, the more likely I am to want a serif font, for some reason.

Kids book = sans serif
Classic lit = serif
Pop science/history = sans serif

I appreciate a typesetter advising me with which font to use*, but now the tech exists to change it, I would be mighty annoyed if it was taken away.

And justifying the paragraph so it fills up the entire line is some bullshit, dnw. I'm one of those who notice this and would really prefer it didn't happen.

*that first sentence's grammar got me confused, so apologies for the clumsiness.

years and years and years of publishing precedent argue against left justification, is the problem

I totally get why that spacing issue would bother some people, and sometimes when it's very obvious, it bothers me too. What did bother me about that text was that it was fully justified (which accounts for the spacing problem). I like ragged right edge.

I'm the same with audiophilia - I am usually OK with getting the "gist" of the music I'm hearing. Though I appreciate why it would be different for other people.

You know what irks me though? Is the way some "audiophiles" and "font snobs" seem to care about those things (and care very vocally) b/c it makes them seem refined and sensitive. Again, SOME of them.

many xps

years and years and years of publishing precedent argue against left justification, is the problem

― OH NOES, Thursday, December 22, 2011 1:23 PM (17 seconds ago) Bookmark Permalink

yeah idgi is that really the default setting on the nook

I mean justified text blocks pretty much empirically look better and read better when they are carefully tweaked by hand and hyphenated and whatnot. One of the big reasons that a lot of these justified blocks look bad is that they are averse to automatic hyphenation of words, whereas TeX is all about automatic hyphenation. You can't fill up lines in a pleasing fashion without being able to auto-hyphenate, since really all you're doing in that case is taking the ragged-right paragraph layout and stretching all the interword spaces until each line is justified.

as an example, in the Fangtasia excerpt, this paragraph:

"Fangtasia," Pam said, as if she were bored more
completely than anyone had ever been bored.

would look better if it were set like this:

"Fangtasia," Pam said, as if she were bored more complete-
ly than anyone had ever been bored.

because a lot of that extra interword space in the first line would go away.

yeah but then you have the hypen

yes but that's why hyphens were invented, so justified text blocks could have aesthetically pleasing amounts of interword space!

I find hyphens dis
-tracting

maybe because you are using them incorrectly?

fine

I find hyphens dis-
tracting

I find hyphenating less
annoying           then
badly justified text.

Do you actually find hyphens distracting? like I promise you every book you've ever read has about three words that are hyphenated across a line break per page, are you distracted by them every single time? xp

no

a little distracting yes

what really bugs me is how shitty that sentence is

all books should just be printed on one long fortune cookie fortune

I don't think the issue is either hyphenating or bad justification -- it's that the column width on most readers is so small that either one would need to do massive overtime to correctly set the text, and intrude pretty obnoxiously.

one word at a time is a good way to read

there's a left-justified example of the lorem ipsum paragraph in the link. it doesn't look v good either tbh

these are actually sub ms-word algorithms they're using; kerning is somewhat better in word since the last big redo. i don't really get why something that ought to be a core technology on these is so slapdash.

i find this a deeply odd argt.:

I appreciate a typesetter advising me with which font to use, but now the tech exists to change it, I would be mighty annoyed if it was taken away.

bcz typesetting is a craft with half a millenium of experience and weight behind it; there are people who are just good at this - ! otoh i did just go look up the physical version of that novel on amazon and that's pretty shoddily set too tbh so

I don't think the issue is either hyphenating or bad justification -- it's that the column width on most readers is so small that either one would need to do massive overtime to correctly set the text, and intrude pretty obnoxiously.

thank you for articulating what was really bothering me, there we go^^^^

maybe that's why I don't like reading on e-readers, the page is too small!

I fear the day when my eyesight goes and I can't use teeny tiny fonts anymore

all books should just be printed on one long fortune cookie fortune

http://www.addamsfamily.com/addams/tickertape2.jpg

I've got three books open on my desk. One of them is 1Q84; it's got +/- 44 lines of text per page, +/- 100 characters per line. There are 0-3 hyphens per page, and only prominent – immediately noticeable - weird spacing due to justification. The text is fairly dense, and it easily absorbs a lot of spacing issues w/o seeming too deliberate. I have yet to see an ereader/electronic screen that can display that amount of information in a way that is not overwhelming or eyestrain inducing...

there's also stuff like - pretty much all faber poetry is typeset the same way. it's a part of how the meaning and the weight of the words you read are constructed. i'm not sure i like the idea of taking that away from the interaction you have with the text. (there's an argument that having personae reduced to the same standards as a self-published .epub of poetry about vampires is a democratic step forwards and a good thing but i think it's an argument that's basically wrong.)

xpost yeah that's another thing -- pretty sure that a lot of ppl who read a lot will use this things with smaller text; screenshots always seem to have like a 35-45 character wide line. (this is in part bcz if you want a screenshot that works on a monitor which is most likely going to have a smaller dpi you need to not use the smallest text size.)

only ONE prominent - immediately noticeable – spacing due to justification.