15 Dec
2014
15 Dec
'14
4:11 a.m.
On Sun, Dec 14, 2014 at 07:18:17PM -0500, Toby Thain wrote:
[...]
I am hoping for a "premium" tier of ebooks.
The current versions are
typographically horrible (think 1987 DTP) and overpriced.
I would expect this tier would have:
* complete proofreading and debugging
* high quality fonts
* actual input from designers and typographers
* all of the above leading to a better reading experience
* high quality images (implying better UI, which puts pressure on
the device platform itself...)
Are you objecting to ebook pricing in general, or just Kindle? Because the
Kindle platform is a joke. The hardware's crap, the UI is worse, and the books
I tried were badly OCRed from paperbacks and not proofread. Bizarrely, even
out-of-copyright works that have excellent versions on Project Gutenberg were
also shoddy. Some of Apple's free samples were similarly half-jobbed.
I note that ebooks I've bought through Humble Bundle and direct from O'Reilly
and a few other places are of reasonable-to-good quality. This suggests that
it's just the big names that are cutting corners because they are making money
hand-over-fist without needing to do it well.
However, you missed "good library management". Kindle, iBooks, etc seem to be
designed as if one's library is a half-dozen pulp novels which are thrown away
when done. My iTunes library contains 692 "books" -- some pulp novels, but
mostly technical documentation and papers -- and it's already unmanageable. In
particular, ebook readers don't let me have a half-dozen documents open and
have poor random-access so I can't easily skip around checking references.
If we are going to be screwed on price we should
demand better quality :)
Or just pirate them :)
Much as a high end print book has. (And the low end
stabilised to "decent"
layout and typography decades ago, thanks to farsighted paperback publishers
like Penguin who invested in design and typography.)
You still see this in self-published books where there wasn't an editor who
would quietly take the corrupted Word document and burn it, then re-typeset it
with sensible styles and no Comic Sans or Papyrus.
And then we come to self-published books on Kindle. *shudder*