Cross-posted at Digital Book World. Part 1 is also on both this site and DBW.

When I first decided to try reading an e-book on my iPod Touch, I assumed—since I’ve been designing and typesetting book interiors for more than a decade and have strong opinions about what makes text readable and appealing—that poor typography would be my biggest complaint about the e-reading applications I tried. In the event, it turns out that as with print books, I’m much more tolerant of ugly, poorly set text than I expected. Just as I’m capable of losing myself in the pages of a cramped, blurry mass-market paperback if the story is one I want to read, so, too, can I block out consciousness of the less-than-ideal typography of an e-book viewed on a small screen. In fact, though I haven’t tried to empirically test this theory, I believe I might read novels faster on my iPod than I used to do on paper. Or maybe I comprehend better, or remember more of what I read.

Still, I’d rather have the option of making the text look good, and if an e-book’s appearance seriously offends me, I’m batty enough to crack it open and change it. I now actually get paid to do this, which sometimes feels like I’ve hit upon the best scam ever. (Other times, not so much. See below under anchovies.)

As any text designer can tell you, there are entire degree programs, conferences, and libraries of books on the subject of typography. So I won’t try to explain the whats, hows, and whys in a late-night blog post; but take my word for it that in good print design, there is a balance between several elements, including but not limited to

• typeface style (serif or sans serif? old style, transitional, modern, Clarendon? geometric, gothic, grotesque?)
• type size (which, as you know if you’ve ever fooled around with typefaces when trying to hit a certain page count on a term paper, is about more than just point size)
• leading—the amount of space between lines of type
• measure—the width of the block of text
• alignment—is the text
  • centered, as in section headings and some truly terrible books of poetry?
  • fully justified, with the spaces between words squeezed or expanded so that they form a solid, sharp-edged text block?
  • rag right, aka left-justified?
  • rag left, aka right-justified—extremely rare in book-length texts but sometimes seen in advertising, to make things line up in a pretty but hard-to-read way?
• word spacing
• letter spacing
• margins

A print designer can also control whether and how words are hyphenated (for example, I don’t like to see a two-letter fragment before or after a hyphen; it’s ugly and, I feel, more likely to lead to misreading, so I always set hyphenation tools to keep a minimum of three letters on either side of a break), as well as when and how deeply the first lines of paragraphs are indented (for instance, we usually don’t indent the first line beneath a heading, because it’s already obvious that a new paragraph has started).

So how much of this can an e-book designer control?

Consistently across all platforms? Pretty much jack shit nothing.

You can present serving suggestions, as it were, but you cannot plate the dish. Some e-reading devices and software automatically add ketchup (if not freaking anchovies) to everything, some serve everything up on divided styrofoam plates, and the reader can nearly always at least add salt.

Welcome to the dark side of my job.

Still, whether it makes me sometimes want to fork my eyes out or not, I promised you a rundown of typographic options in an assortment of e-reading applications, so that is what you will get.

Picking the fonts

When layfolk think of typography at all, what they usually think of is picking the fonts. Fonts are fun. Who among us didn’t sit there trying out all those goofy typefaces, upon first installing Microsoft Word? (What? You are too young to remember life before Word? Sorry, I can’t hear you—let me turn my hearing aid up. Squeeeeeeek.) Changing the font changes the way a text feels; it can make the author seem nerdy or cool; it can keep you from getting lost; it can change how you rate a text. Or it can make you throw the book across the room in disgust. But, wait—if you’re reading an e-book, you no longer have to keep your pitching arm limber! You can just change the font. To what?

Kindle.app: 0 fonts

Kobo: 4 fonts

Nook.app: 5 fonts

All displayed in the menu using the same font, so you’d better know what each one looks like.

iBooks: 6 fonts

Google Books: 7 fonts

Is more better? Not really. I use Georgia most of the time (sometimes Verdana, if I’m reading in night mode); couldn’t care less about the rest. YMMV.

Size matters

One of the big selling points of e-books is that each reader can adjust the size of the text to suit his or her preferences. There’s no longer a need to track down bulky, expensive large-type editions, or to use a magnifier to make conventionally sized text legible; you can just make the type larger, and everything will reflow to fit the screen.

How big is big, though, and how small is small? The following pairs of screenshots show the largest and smallest text in each app.

Google Books

iBooks

Kindle.app

Kobo

Nook.app

Attentive persons will note that the font displayed on the Nook.app is not Georgia, although that’s what I have the app set to use, and “use publisher settings” is off. Go figure.

Leading

Leading (rhymes with “heading”), also known as line spacing or line height, can have a profound effect on readability. Yet of the e-reading apps I’m looking at, only two let you alter this setting: Nook.app gives you four choices, and Google Books gives you three.

The screenshots below show the extremes of leading at the smallest and middle font sizes. The leading is proportional to the font size, so as the text gets larger, so does the spacing between the lines.

Nook.app

Google Books

Justification

One of the absolute worst things about typography on e-readers is that most apps, and most publishers, fully justify text by default. On a small screen, with primitive hyphenation algorithms, this is what most often makes me want to stab myself in the eye. At a very small font size, in landscape mode, it can look okay—

—but full justification is not appropriate for every part of a book—

—and at large font sizes, it can look like a dog’s breakfast:

In my opinion, left-justified or rag-right text would be a much safer default, but that wouldn’t fit in with all the stupid “Look! It’s just like a real book!” chrome that software developers seem to think readers want. More on that in a separate episode.

Fortunately, both Kobo and Nook.app let you either force the justification to rag-right or use whatever justification settings the publisher has specified in the file. Unfortunately, neither app shows the publisher’s settings by default.

Margins

Nook.app is alone among those under consideration in letting the reader change the page margins.

Please check your InterWeb Guide to find out when the next exciting installment will air!

About two weeks ago, in a fit of pique, I posted some gripes about my current e-reading application of choice, which is Kobo for the iPhone/iPod Touch. I was pressed for time, so I didn’t provide any context, such as why Kobo’s is my favorite e-reading app, which apps I’ve chosen it over, and whether the things I find awesome and annoying about it are unique to Kobo or are universal across the e-reading–on–iOS world right now.

Here, finally, is the first in a series of posts providing that context. Specifically, I’ll be walking through five of the e-reading applications I’ve used on the iPod Touch, explaining what I see as the pros, cons, and OMFG-what-were-they-thinkings of each.

Reading preferences are personal

Two assumptions I encounter often when talking with people about e-reading are

1. the only e-reading devices that matter are relatively large-format devices—e.g., Kindle, iPad, or Nook; and
2. one type of screen, whether e-ink or LCD, is inherently better for reading—all types of reading, for everyone—than the other.

And then I tell them I do most of my reading on an iPod Touch, and they look at me like I’m in-freaking-sane.

Because we’re not used to having choices about how we read, beyond hardcover vs. trade paperback vs. mass-market vs. large print, most people haven’t thought much about what makes reading comfortable for them. If they enjoy one book more than another, they usually credit the content, not the presentation. Partly that’s because, if everyone at the publishing house is doing his or her job¹, the reader shouldn’t notice the physical nature of the book at all once they get into it. All the attention should be on the content. But if each reader could choose how his or her books look and function, we might see a much broader variation in fonts, layouts, paper, bindings, and so on. With the explosion of e-reading devices and applications, we’re starting to get some idea of that variety.

So the preferences I’ll be expressing here are merely that—preferences. My preferences. Having worked with books for most of my life—selling them, producing them, designing them, and, of course, reading way more of them than the average citizen—I’m in no way an average reader. And I’m wicked nearsighted, and I like to read in the dark. I don’t expect my preferences to match anyone else’s. I’m also atypical as a reader of e-books because I read on a smaller device than most people find comfortable (or think they’ll find comfortable; when I ask people if they’ve tried reading on a small device, the answer is nearly always “no”), and I don’t expect most people to follow my example.

But I think it’s important not to let the discussion about e-books and e-readers get too tied up with dedicated reading devices, such as the Kindle, and large multifunction devices, such as the iPad. Various companies have reported that most e-books are still being read on laptop and desktop computers, and there are a lot of people who aren’t going to be able to afford to buy a new gadget anytime soon—among them, myself. I also think it’s important not to assume that everyone who uses the iOS has an always-on Internet connection. The digital divide is real, and it’s growing wider, not narrower, as far as I know. I’d hate to see books fall into it and not make it back out.

How this series is organized

I debated for some time whether to organize this analysis by application or by function, and I’ve ended up choosing the latter. If you are a reader, you’ll have your own set of priorities about how you want software to behave—I mark up my e-books constantly, so I’m obsessed with annotation tools, the subject of this first installment—while you may not care about markup at all but have wonky vision and therefore be more concerned with what font sizes and color schemes are available in different apps. And if you’re reading this because you’re an interface design person, I figure you’ll probably want to compare how different apps handle the same functions. Some of these issues are evergreen, though the individual apps will change—during the past week, as I’ve been working on this article, I’ve winced every time I’ve synced my iPod, hoping there wouldn’t be a round of application updates that would require me to retake all my screenshots and revise some of my comparisons. I got lucky. We got new devices from Kobo and Barnes & Noble last week, but no new software. Hooray for slow development cycles!

The areas I’m planning to discuss are

• Annotation
• Typography
• Colors and themes
• Wayfinding
• Metadata
• Social Media

And the apps are

• Google Books
• iBooks
• Kobo
• Kindle
• nook

Because I’ll be covering a lot of ground, and because I have been known to wax rambly, I’ll also create a sort of index for the series, in the form of a hyperlinked matrix of applications versus features. It’ll be located at the end of each post, and I’ll included little markers like this [#] throughout the series so you can skip to the grid from wherever. I’ll update it as I post each section.

There will be a lot of screenshots, which I’ll embed as thumbnails to keep the loading time reasonable. Roll over any image to see a caption, including which app it’s from. You can click on any thumbnail to see the full-size screenshot (and caption) on Flickr, or you can just go to the Flickr collection, which is a bit messy right now but is growing tidier, and which I’ve tried to tag in ways that will correspond to the app/feature grid.

Geek on.

Part 1: Annotation

Speed

One of the biggest changes to my reading behavior since I switched to e-books is that I highlight. Constantly. Because I can. Mostly typos. Sometimes I add notes, to clarify why I’ve marked something—e.g., “Sb” for space break, “Run up,” “Italic,” or the expressive “!!!” and “<3 <3 <3″—but mostly I just highlight a couple of words to show where a piece of punctuation is either missing or misplaced.

On a well-edited e-book, I’m capable of reading quietly, just like a normal person, but . . . apparently I don’t read very many well-edited e-books. So until Kobo wooed me away with its shiny Reading Life toys a few months ago (to be discussed later in the series, under metadata), the killer e-reading application feature for me was fast annotation. And my favorite reading app, therefore, was the one called simply eReader—which is owned by Barnes & Noble and, as I understand it, provided the core of what’s now the nook iOS app.

The eReader and nook applications have diverged in the last year, as one is updated and the other is not, but they still share the most efficient, least frustrating interface for highlighting text among all the apps I’ve tried. To select a word or phrase, you drag your finger across the text from where you want the selection to start to where it should end. When you lift your finger, the option to highlight or add a note comes up. It’s rat-simple, and very fast. Even if you highlight on every other screenful, as I sometimes do, it barely interrupts the flow of your reading.

I’ve yet to discover an e-reading application that lets you highlight text spanning more than one page, except for those that snap to whole-paragraph selection.

Precision

Of software

So, what can you mark up? Not always quite what you want.

In iBooks, Kindle, and nook/eReader, you can select any text that fits on the screen—for example, from the middle of one paragraph into the middle of another. As long as you can run your finger over it, it’s yours.

In Kobo’s app, however, you can select text from multiple paragraphs only if you grab the entire paragraphs—um, maybe. If one of those paragraphs runs over to the next screenful, your selection might end up including just part of it. Or you might get all of both paragraphs. Or, as I mentioned in my gripe to them and the Interverse two weeks ago, sometimes the area you’ve selected ends up not being what gets annotated at all—you get some random word from elsewhere on the screen, no matter how carefully nor how many times you select the desired text. And then, when you finally get the text selected and try to add a note, the app crashes. To quote a song by my friend Lucy Foley,

Oh, it’s a tangle, oh, it’s a gamble
Oh, it’s a gamble, oh, it’s a handful

Maybe Kobo could license it as a jingle . . . This kind of buggy mayhem is why, until they added those Reading Life gimcracks, Kobo’s reader was my dead-last choice. Behold the power of colorful data!

Of squishyware

So much for the precision of the software. Now how about the precision of the user?

Another reason I prefer the eReader/nook interface is that all other reading apps use what I gather is the iOS-standard method of text selection:

1. long press to enter selection mode, which by default selects the entirety of the nearest word, then
2. drag the tiny selection handles if you want to choose more than one word.

That’s all fine and nice if you have small, steady fingers and the app developers have taken care not to overlap those tiny selection handles with the selection toolbar. Seems like a big duh, but the latter condition is not always met: in this screenshot of Kobo’s app, the toolbar overlaps the bottom selection handle. Good luck expanding that selection further down the page . . .

I happen to have an intermittent hand tremor—might be hereditary, or might have been brought on by brain damage in graduate school; exacerbated by lack of sleep, caffeine, slow creep toward death, etc. Whatever the cause, on a bad day, I can’t tap those handles to save my life. I’m sure that sometimes other people on my subway car assume I’m playing some kind of game on my iPod, because I keep tapping the screen, dragging, tapping, dragging, tapping, dragging, and looking more and more frustrated, as I try repeatedly to highlight the words I want. It’s not a very disability-tolerant interface.

Color

What if you’re an even more obsessive annotator than I am? What if, when you mark up your e-books, you want to flag different parts of the text in different colors, like you used to do in college, with your pile of multicolored highlighter pens? I honor you, my dorktastic friend. Perhaps try iBooks.

So far, iBooks is the only e-reading app I’ve seen that lets you choose the colors of highlights and annotations. By default, all highlights are the canonical yellow (with a wavy edge and uneven opacity, so it looks just like you used a real highlighter pen! one of the few instances in which I find iBooks’s kitschy emulation of paper books sweet rather than annoying), but once you have highlighted a passage, you can tap the text again to choose the color. If you’ve attached a note, that note also takes on the color of the highlight.

Your color preference then sticks for all subsequent highlights and notes, until you change it again.

The nook app allows you to change the color of your highlights, but only on a document-wide basis; it’s among the theme options. Better than nothing.

Bookmarks

Most e-reading apps allow some kind of screenful-level bookmarking, typically styled as a dog-eared page. Not very interesting or useful, in my opinion—I use it only when I want to skip back in a book I’m in the middle of and am afraid I’ll lose my place; as soon as I return to where I left off, I delete the bookmark.

If you use this kind of marker, I’d love to know what for. Leave a comment!

Annotation Management

Once you’ve marked stuff up, how can you access your notes, highlights, and dogeared pages?

Ha! What a ridiculous question! Why would anyone want to do that?!

Right now, every e-reading app except Kindle follows the Roach Motel Model of Annotation: the notes check in, but they don’t check out.

In iBooks, Kobo, and nook, you can view your annotations only when you have that particular e-book open. You cannot print them, nor can you copy them out to paste them into another application.

Amazon.com is the exception in the area of annotation retrieval, allowing you to view your notes and highlights on the Web at https://kindle.amazon.com/your_highlights, from which you can cut and paste them anywhere you want. Of course, they also do annoying things like show perfect strangers each other’s annotations (you can turn it off but shouldn’t have to), and limit the number of highlights you can make within a given book (or, rather, publishers set the limits, and then Amazon implements those limits in what I think is a boneheaded way). Not every highlight is meant to be shared.

In iBooks, you can delete annotations from the overview screen.

In Kobo’s feckless app, you can delete notes by editing the note and tapping the trashcan icon, but you can’t delete a highlight once you’ve added it. It’s with the book forever. Which is particularly annoying given the app’s previously mentioned tendency to highlight the wrong text.

The roaring silence

At the beginning of this post, when I listed the applications I’d be examining in this series, I included Google Books, yet I haven’t mentioned it once since. What gives?!

Well, Google Books doesn’t have any annotation tools whatsoever.

So there.

To be continued . . .

Index

Watch this space!

Colophon: The book shown in the screenshots throughout this post is Bella Andre’s Ecstasy, which I chose partly because it’s free on multiple platforms (Kindle, iBooks, Sony, Kobo) and partly to annoy @muttinmall, who asked me to write this piece.

1. Note that I don’t just say, “If the designer is doing his or her job,” because sometimes the designer is asked to adhere to nasty size and page-count specifications.

All day I’ve been seeing tweets from @kobo and friends about their having the No. 1 e-reading app in the iTunes store—e.g.,

Breaking News: Kobo #1 Rated eReading App on iTunes App Store http://t.co/pApB8j5

May 19, 2011 10:34 am via Twitter for AndroidReplyRetweetFavorite

@KoboJason

Jason Gamblen | Kobo

I’m so happy for them.

No, really.

For several months now, Kobo’s iOS app has been, mainly because of the stats and the activity tracker, my e-reading application of choice. That said, it’s my app of choice in spite of several intense annoyances, so I’d like to take this opportunity to point out a couple of things that drive me up the fucking wall about it. From the support ticket I just submitted:

Congratulations on having the top-ranked e-reader in the iTunes app store! Now, could you make it better, please?

Bugs

1. The Dictionary / Highlight / Notes / Share toolbar often overlaps highlighted text so that it’s impossible to grab the handles to extend the selection area.
2. Once you’ve highlighted a word or phrase, there is no way to remove the highlight.
3. Sometimes, the chunk of text that’s selected is not the text that ends up being highlighted; sometimes nothing gets highlighted at all. Reselecting the text and rehighlighting it does not solve the problem. Changing the font size to force repagination does sometimes solve the problem, but it’s time consuming.
4. About 25 percent of the times I try to attach a note to selected text, the app crashes. Usually the note is lost in the crash, though the text sometimes remains highlighted.
5. The application crashes about 75 percent of the times I attempt to turn Kobo Styling on or off.

Features

1. I can’t believe that in this modern day and age,¹ I still can’t sort my library by author. Is this because the metadata’s so inconsistent and full of garbage? If so, let users to edit the metadata–at least the title and author.
2. The new user-created shelves are a nice idea, but the interface for adding a book to a shelf is weak: title and author are not enough information to go on if you have a large library. I’d like to be able to long-press on an item to see the cover and more metadata. I’d also like to be able to add a book to shelves from the book’s “Overview” panel.
3. Allow users to edit shelves through Kobobooks.com.
4. Allow users to share activity updates to Goodreads.
5. Allow users to export activity updates and highlights as XML, CSV, HTML table, anything.

Thanks.

There. I feel better now.

1. A string of sailoresque expletives may or may not have been redacted from this area.

So, here’s the partial answer to a question I’ve been wondering about:

Subject: Kindle Title [title] (ASIN:[ASIN]) has an available update

Greetings from Amazon.com.

We’re writing about your past Kindle purchase of [title] by [author]. The version you received contained some errors that have been corrected.

An updated version of [title] (ASIN:[ASIN]) is now available. It’s important to note that when we send you the updated version, you will no longer be able to view any highlights, bookmarks, and notes made in your current version and your furthest reading location will be lost.

If you wish to receive the updated version, please reply to this email with the word “Yes” in the first line of your response. Within 2 hours of receiving the e-mail any device that has the title currently downloaded will be updated automatically if the wireless is on.

You can find more information about Kindle related topics at our Kindle support site below. http://www.amazon.com/kindlesupport

We apologize for any inconvenience caused and thank you for your business with Amazon.

Sincerely,
Customer Service Department
Amazon.com
http://www.amazon.com

It’s a book I’ve already read, so I went to kindle.amazon.com to see if I had made any annotations. Turns out it’s one I’ve got multiple copies of (it was a freebie in all the major e-book stores for a while), so my markup’s on some other version. (If I’ve actually read an e-book, there is always markup; this is one of the biggest changes e-books have made to my reading habits.) I wrote back and said, “Yes.”

When the new file comes, I’ll be keen to know

• What are the differences between the two versions?
• Did they fix any of the errors I’d marked?
• Did any other vendors update the book?
• Is there any indication of version number in the file?
• Did the ISBN change?

Some of these questions have now been answered, in an update at the bottom of this post.

I’m particularly interested in how this works because I’m prepping some e-book files for Cursor right now (no, really, Richard—right now!), and I’m nearly paralyzed with fear over not getting it right on the first try. It’s all fine and nice to mouth off about the importance of QA, until you’re responsible for it . . .

This has also been on my mind because I recently had occasion to complain directly to the publisher of an e-book I was in the middle of, which was positively filthy with errors (most of them, I suspect—we’re talking hundreds—the result of automated ePub conversion, but there were a fair number of genuine typos, as well). The next day I got an e-mail from their senior managing editor,¹ asking me to provide examples of the errors. I’d been reading the book in Bluefire and laboriously² highlighting all the offending passages, as is my compulsion, so it would have been easy to show her, had I been standing there with my iPod. But to get those highlights out, in a human-friendly format, I had to spend some quality time with iPhone Explorer, BBEdit, and regular expressions.

Some publishers contact their customers directly whenever a book is updated—O’Reilly, SitePoint, Take Control come to mind—sometimes offering a free download and sometimes pricing it as a version upgrade, just as software developers do. Not coincidentally, all three of these publish technical books, and they seem to mostly sell directly to their readers. In the case of O’Reilly, even if you buy a print copy of one of their books in a bookstore, you can register it at the site and get a discount on the e-book versions, as well as notices whenever the book is updated. I’ve gotten updated files from all these publishers; none of them, to my recollection, included a changelog stating what had been corrected.

I’ve noticed that Barnes & Noble includes version numbers on its NookBook downloads, but do they tell you when a new version of a file you’ve already downloaded has been released? How are other vendors handling this?

Seems to me there might be a place in the e-book ecosystem for a framework like Sparkle, which seems to manage most of the updates in third-party Mac applications nowadays. The e-mail above also represents a strong argument for managing your annotations through some platform- and format-independent service such as ReadSocial, so that your comments and highlights can stay in place even if you have the same book in multiple formats, and even if the underlying file changes.

Photo: revenge of the spelling bee by postbear / postbear eater of worlds; some rights reserved.

Update, February 4

Okay. So, it took way longer than “within 2 hours” for the new version of that book to show up on any of my devices, but I finally was able to compare the old and new versions side by side (ah, the benefits of having both a laptop and an iMac). I noticed a variety of changes:

1. Replaced two (different) cover pages with one,³ having a different aspect ratio.
2. Added a linked HTML table of contents. There is still no table of contents that the Kindle software recognizes; I’m guessing the file lacks a “guide” section in its .opf?
3. Inserted page breaks among the front matter sections, which had previously been all jammed together (though the dedication is still run into the acknowledgments).
4. Added a colophon graphic to the title page.
5. Inserted the ISBN-10 and ISBN-13 amid the CIP data; there was CIP data before, but no ISBN appeared anywhere in the book, so I can’t say whether they changed it.
6. Removed the stray line break that had appeared after the all-capped first line of each chapter.
7. Added first-line indents that had been missing from most of the body text. (Unfortunately, they also added these to the first paragraph of every chapter, which does not need them.)
8. Changed body text alignment to rag right, thank you very much. (Chapter heads are centered.)
9. Fixed two typos in the first chapter (in both cases, an extra space followed an em dash).
10. Included an image of the back cover of the print book at the end of the e-book. (The back and spine images and text were present before, but they floated free of one another, which looked stupid and made the back cover copy—which was light-colored, to stand out against a dark background that was no longer there—almost unreadable.)

So, some of the changes were to improve usability, some were to improve readability, some corrected errors, and some were cosmetic. One notable nonchange: they left in the “Printed and bound in the USA” statement, as well as the print line (that curious “10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1″ thing, to ye uninitiated), without updating the latter, though they would certainly have done so after making this many changes to the print edition.

I could find no acknowledgment in the visible text that this was a revised version of a previously released file. If someone can instruct me in how to pry open a .mobi file (I do know how to strip off the DRM, but the resulting .mobi can’t just be relabeled a .zip and double-clicked, as an ePub file can), I’ll take another look.

1. WITH A COUPON FOR $20 WORTH OF BOOKS, PLEASE NOTE! This is how you do it, people.
2. O Excellent Micah, please note! It takes way too many taps to make a simple highlight. Compare with how efficiently the eReader iPhone app handles it.
3. I don’t know why it had two in the first place—unless maybe the print edition is one of those where just inside the cover there’s a tipped-in four-color illustration, to sex it up? I used to strip those from our rips when I worked in a bookstore, save them up, and employ them as stationery; I probably still have a stack of unused Fabios somewhere in my house. (In case you aren’t aware, mass-market paperbacks such as romance novels are cheaper to destroy than to re-warehouse when they don’t sell, so booksellers are asked merely to rip off the front covers and send those back for credit. The resulting flayed carcasses, called “rips,” go into the everpresent Dumpster out back.)

Got an e-mail from a fellow book designer this morning asking, “Do you have a blog post about marking up a MS for the designer/typesetter?” Um, I couldn’t remember; had to search my own blog to find out. I found I’d written two posts in which such issues come into play—

• May I take your order? (September 30, 2006)—in which I show the sample pages I prepared to instruct a typesetter on a moderately complicated book design
• How stylish are you? (January 19, 2008)—in which I listed and explained the most common style names I use when marking up or laying out a bookish document

But both of these posts are written from the designer’s desk, whereas my friend was, he later explained, looking for information that might help a fledgling editor (in this case, an editorial intern) understand how to mark up a manuscript. To which I said, “Um, hello, the Chicago Manual?” I know there’s some discussion of markup right there in the front, but I realized I hadn’t consulted that section in the 15th edition in years, and I hadn’t yet checked it in the 16th edition at all. So I looked! And found that there is now a sizable chunk of appendix devoted to markup, with an eye toward producing multiple output formats—print, HTML, e-books, and more. That appendix is heavy going, though, and more theoretical than practical. How might a designer or production editor explain, in, say, under twenty minutes, how a clever intern should mark up a manuscript?

Well. I do think the first two paragraphs in CMS16′s Markup section in Appendix A are a good place to start. Key points:

From A.6, “What is markup?”—

There are four basic ways to apply markup. . . . Briefly, they include markup by pencil on paper; generic markup in a word processor, which is similar to paper markup except that it is typed into the document (see 2.78); word-processing styles (see 2.79); and markup in a formal language such as XML (see 2.80). All of these share a fundamental purpose: to identify each element of a manuscript, from chapter numbers to chapter titles, subheads, paragraphs for running text and block quotations, emphasized text, entries in a bibliography, and so forth.

From A.7, “Semantic and functional markup”—

A formal markup language describes the structure of a document and identifies its components. This type of markup is sometimes referred to as semantic markup because it names the parts of a document rather than describing their appearance. To take one example, though the title Origin of Species might be distinguished from the surrounding text by italics, more meaningful markup would label it as a book title. Such markup would not only differentiate book titles from other types of italicized text (such as names of species or emphasized terms) but would allow them to be presented in something other than the customary italics if desired—for example, boldface or underscored. . . . Moreover, some markup may have formatting or functionality associated with it in one medium but not another. For example, markup that determines hyperlinked text—graphically distinct and clickable in an electronic document—may not be evident on the printed page.

In other words,

• it doesn’t really matter how you indicate the style changes, as long as you follow a system that makes sense; and
• mark up what the text is, not what you think it should look like.

That’s the theory. Now how do you practice it? Well, that depends on which method, of the four listed in A.6, you are following:

1. markup by pencil on paper
2. generic markup in a word processor
3. word-processing styles
4. markup in a formal language such as XML

I’ve seen the first three used extensively in the wild, but so far I’ve yet to receive a manuscript marked up in XML. Not holding my breath, either; XML is rat simple in some ways, but it can also make people extremely cranky.

Every production editor, designer, and compositor probably has his or her own preferred method, and if you’re working in house or freelancing for a steady client, you’ll use the house method. But at your next job, or whenever the current production chief retires, they’re likely to use a different system, so you should understand the gist of all four. Going through them one by one, therefore . . .

1. Markup by pencil on paper

   This is the easiest and lowest tech, and probably therefore still the most common. There’s an illustration of this kind of coding in CMS16, figure 2.5. The basic idea is to write a brief code in the margin and circle it. It’s what we used at St. Martin’s while I was there, and I’ll bet a modest amount of money (hey, I’m underemployed; gimme a break) that it’s what they’re still using four years later. It’s the method I described in the penultimate paragraph of May I take your order?, which highlights the main drawback of this system:

   There’s only one chunk of poetry in this book, but it’s a long and messy one comprising selections from a longer, oddly structured work. The headings on these poetry extracts had all been coded correctly—A and B heads only—on the design dupe in red, and then recoded incorrectly—with three levels of heads—in blue on the setting copy. So I tossed it back on the production editor’s desk with a note asking if it was okay to change them back, and when she said it was, I erased all the (illegible, anyway) codes and remarked them in my color (which is usually brown). Frankly, it’s kind of annoying that the MS comes to me already coded, because quite often I find that the coding is wrong. I spend a lot of time erasing or crossing the codes out and rewriting them.

   Should you need to correct the coding, you either have to erase the old marks—which can be difficult, with some varieties of pencil—or cross them out—which can get ugly. I prefer to cross them out and re-mark in a different color, because it makes it easier for the typesetter to tell what’s going on. If I must erase, I do so as thoroughly as possible (using a Mars eraser or a retractable eraser stick—never the eraser on the end of the pencil, which exists solely to torment and dismay) and then write the new mark right over the old one, so the previous code can’t be read.

   When using this method, it’s rare to label every paragraph. What styles should you mark, then, and how often? The example in CMS shows only the heads being tagged—CT for the chapter title and A for an A-level head; everything else is assumed to be body text. Unless I’m given specific instructions, though, I prefer to err on the side of . . . well, specificity. I’d add the code TNI (per the naming scheme I described in How stylish are you? [BUT: see my comment below, added while I was actually awake]) next to the first paragraph under each heading, and TX next to the first indented paragraph below each of those. After that, I wouldn’t mark anything until the next change in style. I would also err on the side of semantic distinction. I’ll use separate codes for quoted prose extracts, quoted correspondence, and quoted verse, though they might all end up being typeset using essentially the same style.

2. Generic markup in a word processor

   A lot of people do this in exactly the same way as in method 1, but within the actual file instead of on paper. That is, instead of writing “CT” in the margin next to a chapter title and circling it, they type “<ct>” or “[[CT]]” or “***CT***” at the head of the title itself, and without any space after it. The codes could be wrapped in any characters or groups of characters, as long as they’re not ones that occur in the actual text itself. (Angle brackets are probably a safe choice for novel, as long as it’s not science fiction, but it’d be unwise to use them to tag a book about anything related to Web technology, since they’re likely to appear in examples of HTML.)

   Another way to do this kind of markup is with paired start and end tags, as recommended in CMS16 2.78, “Generic markup for electronic manuscripts”:

   <cn> . . . </cn>	chapter number
   <ct> . . . </ct>	chapter title
   <a> . . . </a>	first-level subhead (A-head)
   <b> . . . </b>	second-level subhead (B-head)
   <ext> . . . </ext>	block quotation (prose extract)
   <po> . . . </po>	poetry extract
   <note-a> . . . </note-a>	first-level subhead in endnotes section
   <tdotb>	t with dot below (i.e., when the Unicode character for ṭ is not available in the font being used to prepare the manuscript; see 11.2)
   <! . . . !>	instruction to the typesetter—for example, to consult hard copy or page image for proper alignment or other formatting

   The idea here is that you wrap everything in these pairs of labels:

   <ct>How I Spent My Summer Vacation</ct>
   <tnic1>This summer, I went to Italy with Elisabeth and her family. We stayed a week in each of two separate towns.</tnic1>
   <a>Casole d’Elsa</a>
   <tni>For the first week, we—Elisabeth, her husband, their two daughters, Elisabeth’s parents, and I—stayed at a resort tucked amid the hills of Tuscany. At the top of the nearest hill sat the tiny walled town of Casole d’Elsa.</tni>
   <tx>We spent a lot of time at the pool.</tx>

   Depending on your familiarity with and loyalty toward HTML, this markup system may look comforting or terrifying. Or something in between, which is where it sits for me. It’s my feeling that if you’re going to do this much markup, you might as well aim for valid XML. But if it serves as training wheels for less tech-y publishing people who’re trying to make that transition, that’s worthwhile, too, I guess.

3. Word-processing styles

   This method is described in general terms in CMS16 2.79, “Software-generated styles.” As implemented specifically in MS Word, it has been my preferred method for the last, oh, fifteen years, ever since my programmer friend Steve showed me his super-secret method for quickly applying Word’s built-in styles (which I think was a custom control panel, written in Visual Basic? that supported keyboard shortcuts?). That was in Word 95 for Windows, mind you. MS Word has supported styles since forever, but most Office users still have no idea they exist, much less how to take advantage of them. And a lot of the best ways of taking advantage of them depend on automation, which is a lot less idiot-friendly since Microsoft killed off macros in Office 2008.

   Sigh.

   Styles are by no means unique to MS Word. RTF documents can contain styles, too, and most modern word processors can read and write RTF, if not .doc files. I’ve yet to find another program that makes styles as easy to use as Word does, though.¹ And by easy, I mean fast. And by fast, I mean keyboard-controllable. I really don’t want to have to keep switching between keyboard and mouse when I’m doing something as repetitive as styling a book-length manuscript.

   So I’m still using Word 2004, and I have no idea where you’d find the equivalent controls in the newer versions with the “ribbon” interface. In general, though, the process would be as follows:

   1. Set up some styles. This can be tedious, if you use as many styles as I do, but you need only do it once, and then you can save the whole wad in a document template. I tend to use a lot of colors and fonts, to make the styles easy to distinguish at a glance. Since I’m just going to map them over to corresponding styles in InDesign by name, it doesn’t matter how hideous the Word doc ends up looking. If you’re coding an MS for somebody else, you might want to avoid the psychedelic ransom-note look, though.
   2. If the MS contains reasonably consistent localized formatting (e.g., all the A-level heads are bold, and all the B-heads are bold and italicized), use the “Select all” button in the formatting palette to apply styles to identically formatted noncontiguous chunks.
   3. Use search-and-replace to apply styles as thoroughly as possible to less consistent localized formatting.
   4. Use macros to apply styles to other weird but semiconsistent stuff. For example, if all the chapter titles are in all caps, and each one is preceded by a chapter number and followed by an epigraph, I might record a macro that searches for text in all caps, moves the cursor to the head of the line and applies the CT style, moves the cursor up one line and applies the CN style, and then moves the cursor down two lines and applies the EPI style. I’d then step through the document, styling the first three elements in each chapter using this macro.
   5. Once you’ve applied as much styling as you can through automation, check the whole document page by page to deal with whatever you’ve missed. When you’re done, nothing in the document will be styled as “Normal”; every distinct type of element in the text should have a named style attached to it.

   (All that said, even though I’m still running Office 2004 so I can keep my blessed macros, lately I’ve been doing more of my styling in InDesign. It’s faster to do so using InDesign’s QuickApply than it is to use Word’s formatting palette or the style dropdown on Word’s formatting toolbar. But if you’re an editorial intern who’s being tasked with coding a manuscript, you don’t have that option, so tough luck.)

4. Markup in a formal language such as XML

   Weeeeeell, as I said, I’ve never personally seen this used on a real project. So although I’ve been wanking around with XML for years, and I could explain it in a general way, my description of XML markup as it’s used in publishing would be, at best, a SWAG. There’s some interesting stuff at Start With XML, but it seems geared more toward management types than toward us lowly manuscript monkeys, and there’ve been no new posts on the blog for more than a year.

   So I’m going to pull a Butterfly McQueen and say, “Lawzy, we got to have a doctor! I don’t know nothin’ ’bout birthin’ [XML] babies!” Anybody know of a good how-to-XMLize-books resource that’s adapted to the meanest understanding—or, at least, to the small-press level of meanness? If you have actual battlefield experience with this, care to drop some knowledge in the comments?

No matter which markup method you use, be sure to make a list of all the styles you ended up applying, with explanations as necessary. Keep your style names short, but don’t make anybody have to guess what they stand for.

Phew. Epic. Any questions? Anyone? Bueller?

Photo: US Navy Cryptanalytic Bombe by brewbooks / J Brew; some rights reserved.

1. Any recommendations? And don’t say NeoOffice; I use it sometimes, but it makes me sad.

An amazing opportunity! If only I were a cover designer . . .

Book Cover Designer Needed For Regular Work (Anywhere)

---

Date: 2010-09-13, 9:43AM EDT
Reply to: job-u6jz9-1951195804@craigslist.org

---

We are looking for a book cover designer for regular work. Have 10 book covers that will need to get done immediately.

Note that we will provide the background to use for each cover, you will need to pick an attractive font (some will be provided) as well as colors to match the background, position the titles appropriately and make sure the PDF file meets our formatting requirements.

Thus, no original design other than text and minor boxes here and there will be required.

Will have regular work. Pay is $15 per cover. Will have dozens of them every week. Payment through Paypal.

The following are required:

1. Ability to work fast and meet deadlines.
2. Illustrator/Photoshop Skills
3. Good eye for fonts/colors and the ability/passion for making beautiful covers
4. Excellent communication skills and availability by Skype email.

If interested please email with:

1. BOOK COVER DESIGNER APPLICATION in Email Subject Line
2. Resume.
3. At least two relevant design samples
4. A paragraph on why you think you’d be a good match for us.

Thank you for your time!

• Location: Anywhere
• Compensation: $15 per Cover (Paypal)
• Principals only. Recruiters, please don’t contact this job poster.
• Please, no phone calls about this job!
• Please do not contact job poster about other services, products or commercial interests.

PostingID: 1951195804

(Spotted in new york craigslist > manhattan > jobs > art/media/design jobs by No. 2 Pencil.)

Photo: darts by sethstoll / Seth Stoll; some rights reserved.

I love this article by Lori Fradkin, “What It’s Really Like to Be a Copy Editor” (TheAwl.com, July 21, 2010), though I take issue with her opening example:

The word is douche bag. Douche space bag. People will insist that it’s one closed-up word—douchebag—but they are wrong. When you cite the dictionary as proof of the division, they will tell you that the entry refers to a product women use to clean themselves and not the guy who thinks it’s impressive to drop $300 on a bottle of vodka. You will calmly point out that, actually, the definition in Merriam-Webster is “an unattractive or offensive person” and not a reference to Summer’s Eve. They will then choose to ignore you and write it as one word anyway.

I know this because, during my three-plus years as a copy editor, I had this argument many, many times.

Me, I would have let “douchebag” stand—though I might have queried it, just as a formality. When Kristin Hersh tweeted re her forthcoming memoir, Rat Girl,

I couldn’t help but reply as follows:

I say it depends on how it’s being used. RT @kristinhersh the poor copy editor at Penguin had to tell me that “apeshit” is not 1 word, but 2

Per Wordnik, the closed form of “apeshit” is by far the most common. @kristinhersh Show your CE: http://is.gd/bzHMe vs. http://is.gd/bzHOf.

.@kristinhersh Also, “An experienced copyeditor will recognize and not tamper with unusual figures of speech or idiomatic usage”—CMS 15:2.56

So, there.

(via @sarahmaclean)

Photo: Putting Kool-Aid in small containers by Breibeest; some rights reserved.

In defense of the presentation’s being, um, a bit vague in parts—like, the last several minutes before the Q&A—I’d like to point out that (1) I was still editing my slides until one minute before I had to step up to get miked, and (2) InDesign decided to crash as I tried to print my talking points cheat-sheet, and I hadn’t been done writing them, anyway, so I didn’t have much to go on, especially toward the end. I wung it. It’s not the most unprepared I’ve ever been for a presentation, but it’s in the top three, I’m pretty sure. Also, (3) I’d had less than two hours of sleep.

You should watch some of my classmates’ presentations, too. I saw only a handful of them—not even all those that took place after mine was over—and I doubt the videos do them justice, but I can attest that in person, the following presenters slew mightily: Neo (Sangzoon) Barc, Sara Bremen, Marco Castro Cosio, Jayoung Chung, Ozge Kirimlioglu, Carolina Vallejo, and Filippo Vanucci.

Time	Transcript
0:00	Hello! My name is India Amos, and I am—[applause]—a textist.
0:17	I was an incessant reader in grade school, I was an English major in college, my first job out of college was working as a clerk in a bookstore for minimum wage, and almost every job I’ve had since then has been in the book field: working at nonprofits, running a visiting writers program, designing books, working as a managing editor at a small press, working as managing editor for a number of silly literary magazines that nobody reads, and designing books here at ITP—[applause]
0:56	But I also, at the same time that I started learning to design books, started learning HTML. So the two are irreparably linked in my mind. I see them as both containers for text. I’m very open to the idea that text can be displayed on multiple devices and should be accessible to everyone regardless of whether they have this kind of computer or that kind of browser, and you should be able to read it on your cellphone. It’s for transmitting information. It’s about the information that’s in the text.
1:33	However, I have been known to acquire books just because they look pretty. I have been known to acquire more than one version of the same book just because I find it interesting that they look different. And like presumably most people who are drawn to working in publishing, I’m invested in the physical properties and the emotional quality of reading a paper book.
1:57	But while I’m drawn to beautiful containers, I’m also concerned about sustainability. And, knowing how the publishing industry works, from the inside, I know that it’s not sustainable the way it currently operates right now. People say, “Why do books cost so much?” Well, part of it is because we’re dragging trees across the planet all the time. [laughter] That’s why your paperback now costs—that used to be the dollar-fifty paperback—now costs seven dollars. Because it probably got printed someplace really far away, the trees got dragged from somewhere really far away, and all of that costs money. And then they pulp them when they don’t sell, which is also wasteful.
2:47	Right now you could argue that electronic readers are also not sustainable. Obviously all that stuff ends up in landfills when it becomes obsolete. But I do think that electronic is the way it’s going to go for most of the things that we read every day. Obviously there will still be keepsake books, art books, cookbooks—certain kinds of books lend themselves to having a physical copy. Reference books. A lot of people here have been assigned readings on the Safari Books Online, and I know in one class people complained that they didn’t feel like they’d really read it when they read it online, and that it’s—I know from experience that it’s harder if you have the textbook on the screen that you’re working on, that you’re trying to code on, and you’re looking at a textbook about how to code. You really want it to be next to you so you can look at both at the same time. So I think the book will persist but that we’ll see a lot more different variants of it.
3:53	And, so, of course I thought, “Well, what can I do for a thesis project that will allow me to read as many trashy books as possible?” [laughter]
4:03	And because I’m interested in that experience of reading the book, I wanted to try it on as many devices as possible. And that required reading an awful lot of junk—and classics, of course. I read Benjamin Franklin, and The Three Musketeers, and then a lot of romance novels.
4:27	And I read them on one of these [pointing to iMac on the desk]—
4:29	I read them on one of these [pointing to MacBook]—
4:32	I read them on one of these, which you’ve probably all seen [holding up a Kindle 2]—
4:36	And on this is actually what I did most of my reading on, in many different applications.
4:45	I also looked at these other devices. There’s a Barnes and Noble nook. The iPad you may recognize. This is a Kobo that just came out in Canada last week, and I had someone smuggle one down here for me so that I could press all the buttons on it last night and find out that you can’t actually bookmark anything in it, which is just bizarre. This is a Sony Reader.
5:09	And so all of these—every single one of them—has a different interface. These are all—these are iPhone applications, but it’s just an example. They all have different settings. They all have different ways of dealing with really basic stuff that normally would be the province of a book designer, like me. I would choose the typeface; I would choose the spacing. I would choose whether it’s justified along both sides or whether it’s ragged right along one side, and how much space there is between the lines—it’s designed to give you a certain impression. But when you’re reading things on all these different devices, you have to be able to change it, to suit your device and to suit your needs.
5:54	You may not know [holding up iPod] that people who are dyslexic apparently have a better time reading on a small screen that turns pages one at a time.1 So they see a single chunk of text rather than scrolling. If you scroll, you lose that sense of what you’re reading if you’re dyslexic, apparently. Or if you have a not-so-great working memory—if you have very little short-term memory so that you can carry what you’ve read on when you turn the page.
6:27	Also, people who are visually impaired need really big text. And right now we have large-type books, but the size is constrained by the cost. Because when you make the type larger, you end up with a lot more paper—that you’re dragging across the planet, back and forth, and pulping—and that you have to move into the stores where the people who have the vision impairment actually buy their books, which is hard to predict. And it’s wasteful. Whereas on an electronic device, theoretically you can make the type as big as you want. What happens, though, is they all have different—[pointing to slide] We have “gigantic” text here, “large-ish,” “huge,” “normal,” “largest,” “smallest”—it’s arbitrary. And the largest type size on the Kindle application on the iPad is apparently not very large,2 so that’s not helpful. And that’s a pretty major application.
7:22	So we’ve come—for five hundred years we’ve been working on perfecting this book thing, and yet
7:32	now we’re back to this. If you’ve ever seen this popular video on YouTube, which I will not play for you, but you get the idea . . .
7:42	And we’re back to this. Which, to a book designer, is torment. [laughter]
7:55	This is a table—in case you don’t recognize what that is on the right there—in Ben Franklin’s autobiography.
8:05	Which brings me to this, one of my favorite tweets ever, which is, to me—”E-books might be okay?” “PAPER SMELLS NICE I READ IT IN THE TUB”—it’s absolutely true, first of all. Every time you see an article about e-books, there’s always somebody in the comments who says, “I love the smell of paper! I’ll never read an e-book, ever!” [laughter] And they probably already have read an e-book. Or they’ve read something electronically. They’ve downloaded a PDF and read it on their screen. They’ve looked at the “Look inside the book” on Amazon to decide which paper book they’re going to buy and smell. [laughter] People read e-books all the time, but they don’t realize that they’re doing it; they don’t think of that as electronic reading.
8:51	And I’m concerned with what does this do to us, to read in a different medium. Because the medium, as we’ve heard, is at least part of the message. And what does it mean when you switch from a medium where you have a sense of space in it, and you can tell how far you are through it, and you maybe have a physical sense of where on the page something that you read is, so that you can find it again, to a device where, yeah, sometimes you can search—you actually can’t search in the Kindle application. A lot of them you can search. Sometimes you can bookmark—not always, as I pointed out. Sometimes it’s very difficult to write notes, if you’re on one of these [holding up iPod] and you don’t have a keyboard and you’re trying to poke out little notes to yourself, it’s a nuisance. What does that do to scholarship? What does that do to how you retain what you read?
9:49	There’s a theory that now that books are searchable, you don’t need to index them anymore. But there’s been a study done showing that when you give people a choice between searching or reading a human-edited index, they find what they’re looking for much faster using the index.3 It’s not the same thing.
10:09	And there’s also been a very good essay written about how library research is changed by using things like search. If you put in the same terms, everyone finds the same thing, over and over. Whereas in the normal course of library research there is an element of serendipity. You see things on the stacks, what you notice depends on how tall you are, perhaps; depends on whether the thing next to it was shelved in the right place.4 And so we’re losing this randomness. And randomness may be part of what creates our knowledge—odd things rubbing up together and giving us ideas.
10:57	So what I have been doing [switching to Web browser]—and sorry I didn’t set this up first—is following a lot of discussions online and trying to get a grasp on what is happening out there. And originally I had thought, “Oh, well, I’ll write a catalogue of all of the features of all these different e-books, and it’ll be great, and I can tell everybody what’s going on. But the field changes so quickly—the software is updated constantly, new hardware comes out every day—it’s really hard to stay on top of it. So it seems to me that the most useful thing now is to just have discussions about it with other people who are interested in the subject, and create a space where people can talk about this. So I have a blog that is already about book stuff, and that a surprising number of people read, and so I’ve started posting really geeky stuff about how these applications work and what the problems are with them. And I’ve been participating in a lot of Twitter conversations with a lot of people in publishing, and also just e-book enthusiasts, and they’re interested in this.
12:23	So, that’s kind of—it’s an ongoing project. It’s an ongoing thesis. I thought it would have an end, at the beginning of the semester. I thought it would be a concrete thing that I could just present to you, and have lots of slides. But, in fact, it’s turned into this open-ended thing. And I’m excited about where e-books are going, I’m excited about the future; I’m also concerned, as I’ve said, about these various issues, about usability, accessibility. There’s also the “digital divide” issue. What happens if books start being published only electronically? Then only people who have electronic devices can access them. Is that a problem? Or is it not, considering that cell phones have such intense penetration in some places where there’s no other technology that’s really prevalent? In Japan, they’re selling something like five million books a year from cell phones alone.5 So . . .
13:30	It’s changing very rapidly, and I just would like to see some more thought put into how this change is affecting our knowledge, and make sure that people are not losing the sense of books as a beautiful thing—they don’t have to be ugly just because they’re electronic—and just finding the place for text in this new world.
14:00	That is all. Thank you. [applause]
14:13	Shawn Van Every: You mentioned right at the beginning that you started doing book design and learning HTML and doing Web design at sort of the same time. I’m wondering, with this proliferation of platforms for e-books, is there design that can be done in each of these platforms? And if not, why do you think they’re actually creating all these different platforms and not just, sort of, taking a Web browser, which is getting really—which has the ability to present very sophisticated designs? I’m just wondering what’s your take on that.
14:57	Me: Basically what a lot of these readers are is Web browsers. The core of most of the e-book formats is HTML. They start with HTML, they put a catalogue in it to show you where the chapters are, and then they wrap it in digital rights management—DRM—so that it can only be used on this device or that device. Essentially it’s the same file, but it’s got different packaging on it. And then what that gets read in is a very primitive browser, and we’re partying like it’s 1997 [laughter] on, for example, the iPad. It has cascading stylesheets support that’s so spotty, it doesn’t support really obvious things.
15:40	More important than that, though, I think, is that you can control certain aspects of this from the designer’s side, but readers want to have control. I’ve talked to a bunch of people who read a lot of e-books and who say, “I hate the books that are designed. I don’t want somebody designing it. I want to be able to change the text and the alignment so that it suits my way of reading.” And so there has to be a balance. I would like to see them look better, but I also think that the flexibility has to be kept there.
16:16	Rob Ryan: I was curious—a lot of what you’re talking about, other than the aesthetics and the art of reading on an e-book reader or on a screen—on the back end of it, I’m curious if you’ve looked at any research like [Maryanne] Wolf, or, I don’t know if you’ve read Proust and the Squid. She’s asked a lot of these same questions. She works at—she’s a researcher at Tufts. And she never really gets to an answer in any of her research, either, about, like, how does this nature of reading in this medium change the nature of how we learn, how we contextualize information, and how the process of reading, which really hasn’t changed very much for thousands of years, how is it going to change coming forward? I wondered how, like, if you looked at any of that after you started addressing some of the aesthetic issues. And then, also, is, in your research in looking at this, are publishers even taking that kind of research into account? They don’t even care. But it’s all profitability?
17:23	Me: No. They’re not aware of it. That’s why I wanted to start this discussion on my space, because—that is, not “my space,” the MySpace, [laughter] but “my space,” with a space in the middle—because I know all these people, and they’re talking aboout e-books every single day; they’re tweeting hundreds of tweets about e-books, and nobody is talking about this. So, yeah. And there’s a surprising amount of research about it, but it’s all buried in SpringerLink, and so nobody can find it.
17:57	Nancy Hechinger: What essentially is—have you found out, other than reading in the bathtub, what people miss in the new way? And then personally I’m wondering about multiple platforms. Because I’ve been finding—it’s an expensive way to go, but I’m trying to read some very thick books lately, and I have it in paper, and then I listen to it, and I have it electronically. I have it in paper because I’ve had it for forty years. But, I mean, I want to be able to make this switch more easily. From listening to—reading by hearing, as opposed to reading by—I mean, is anybody working on—I know you can—you can have text—you can listen to your Kindle, but it’s not the same as a dramatic reading.
18:45	Me: You can listen to your Kindle if the publisher allows you to listen to it. They can turn that on and off on a book-by-book basis.
18:55	There is a company in the UK called Enhanced BooksEditions that is doing audio and text that are synced up. They’re doing iPhone applications, and I know they did one that’s been very popular. But as far as I know, nobody else is doing that right now.
19:14	Publishers are talking about bundling. Some publishers do let you get books in multiple formats. No one is bundling audio and text right now besides Enhanced BooksEditions—that I know of. But right now for me the big issue is you have to decide what you’re going to read the book on before you buy it. You have to know [holding up Kindle], “All right. I want to read it on this. So I have to buy it from Amazon. Or I have to get it in a format that I can get onto this, that may cost me money to transfer a file onto it. And then I can read.” [Picking up iPod] If I want to read it on this, chances are good that I won’t be able to transfer that to my laptop and read it there. So, as I go from place to place, my books can’t follow me. There is one company, Kobo, that is trying to have books that are transferable between all of those different platforms. They have an app for every platform, and then you can move the same book from your phone to your iPod to your laptop, but [DING!] it’s rare. [applause]

1. Howard Hill, “My iPhone has revolutionised my reading,” Guardian, April 6, 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/apr/06/iphone-makes-reading-books-easier.
2. “[Kindle.app for iPad] type sizes are limited to five choices, from legal-text small to not quite that big (especially when compared to iBooks’ largest type size, which I referred to yesterday a ‘honkin’ huge’, and I meant it). This is somewhat surprising, since one of the hardware Kindle device’s main attractions is the ability to make type really really large, which is helpful to people hard of sight.” Pablo Defendini, “Kindle on iPad: The Incumbent,” The New Sleekness (weblog), April 8, 2010; http://www.thenewsleekness.com/index.php/kindle-on-ipad-the-incumbent/.
3. Noorhidawati Abdullah and Forbes Gibb, “Using a Task-Based Approach in Evaluating the Usability of BoBIs [back-of-book indexes] in an E-book Environment,” Advances in Information Retrieval (Berlin / Heidelberg: Springer, 2008), 246–257.
4. Andrew Abbott, “The Traditional Future: A Computational Theory of Library Research,” College & Research Libraries 69:6 (2008), 540–1; http://crl.acrl.org/content/69/6/524.short. He goes on to write, “‘efficient’ search is actually dangerous. The more technology allows us to find exactly what we want, the more we lose this browsing power. Library research, as any real adept knows, consists in the first instance in knowing, when you run across something interesting, that you ought to have wanted to look for it in the first place. Library research is almost never a matter of looking for known items. But looking for known items is the true-indeed the only-glory of the technological library. The technological library thus helps us do something faster, but it is something we almost never want to do; furthermore, it strips us in the process of much of the randomness-in-order on which browsing naturally feeds. In this sense, the technologized library is a disaster.” (541)
5. And did you know that 78 percent of all statistics are made up? I totally pulled this number out of my ass, it seems. What I was thinking of was this: “According to the IDPF [International Digital Publishing Forum], in 2006, publishers sold some $22 million worth of e-books in the U.S., numbers which the organization expects top $30 million or more this year. In Asia, where laptops and cell phones are more sophisticated than in the US or Europe, the numbers are much more significant. The Digital Content Association of Japan estimating sales of e-books topping $126 million in 2006, with $58 million of that coming from sales from mobile phones—an increase of some 331% from the previous year..” Emphasis mine. Edward Nawotka, “Our Digital Future,” Publishing Research Quarterly 24:2, 128; http://www.springerlink.com/index/10.1007/s12109-008-9066-y

I’ve added a sideblog to capture some of the things I come across in my daily lurking on the booktwitternet. It’s tucked in the middle of a lot of other junk right now, but when I have time, I’ll put it in its own sidebar. Should you wish to follow the sideblog via RSS, the address is http://feeds.feedburner.com/indiainkmarginalia.

Photo: Kellermann, Germany 1938 by lord enfield; some rights reserved.

This Thursday at 12:40 p.m., I have to publicly present some sort of something about my vague and fugitive master’s thesis. The talk—about ten minutes’ worth—will be streamed online so you, my friends, can all point and laugh, and the video will be archived somewhere (hopefully somewhere dark and offline) after the event.

Oy vey.

In the meantime, I’m trying to figure out what the hell to say and show, and I’ve had to write a short description of my work for a (printed!!) book of my class’s thesis projects—a book that was, of course, laid out by me, who obviously had nothing better to do with my time. The following is the lofty prose I came up with, sometime between birds-tweeting-time and sunrise this morning:

As an ardent textist—one who is concerned with language, typography, and the way the two interact to help us comprehend and share ideas—I am both anxious and excited to discover how electronic reading ­software affects the reading experience, positively and negatively, and how it can be improved. Each of the many e-reading interfaces now available—whether on dedicated reading appliances or on multi­function devices such as computers, cell phones, and the iPad—has a different way of handling typography, layout, navigation, bookmarking, annotation, search, and library management. Some applications handle certain tasks better than others, but none of them yet supports the needs of an engaged reader well enough to fully replace traditional paper books. And if they could . . . what happens to our comprehension and our ability to make use of what we learn when we read using an electronic device? Does reading e-books change the way we understand text? Does it make learning harder or easier? Does the use of e-books have consequences for children, for the dyslexic, for people with poor working memory? Does it have particular ramifications for scholars? If researchers shift to using e-books for more of their sources, will that change the nature of their findings? I have been exploring these issues through hands-on examination of e-reading devices and software, by following the discourse among publishers and avid e-book readers online, and by reviewing scholarly research in the field. By sharing my findings and encouraging further discussion of these issues, I hope to help raise the standards of e-book formatting, e-reading software, and e-reader hardware so that they better support the many types of reading we do, and to further the design of e-reading environments that can help readers learn more, understand more, and enjoy reading more.

Brings a tear to your eye, doesn’t it?

Cross-posted at the old blog location, for faithful readers’ convenience. I’m still fixing broken links and glitches from the move, so if you see anything weird here, please drop me a note: india at indiamos.com.