Basics of "why ebooks look different"

[elf]

Print books are a page-based layout medium. What the producer puts on the page is what the receiver sees, barring exotic technological interventions. (Colored filters for dyslexic readers, magnifying lenses, complex projectors that put the content up on a large screen... whatever. Those aren't how most books are read.)

Ebooks, on the other hand, are a tagged-language medium. What the producer creates is the suggestion of format; what the receiver views is filtered through hardware and software to display something like that intent. In order to make reflowable text, able to grow or shrink or display sideways in the device, the creator can't decide exactly where the line breaks go, how deep the margins are, and how many words fit on a page. The exact appearance of the ebook will be based somewhat on the software and hardware used to read it.

PDFs try very hard to maintain the print layout system. (Which make sense, since PDF stands for "Portable Document Format," and it was invented to allow documents to be printed the same way without the need for matching fonts & print drivers on multiple systems.) But even it isn't quite the same as a print book... you can zoom in to a PDF; you can rotate the pages; if you've got the right software, you can change the margin sizes, move the lines of text around, delete images, or watch embedded videos as well as read the text. You can even rearrange the pages (although I don't recommend doing this for most novels).

The other ebook formats are different. EPub and mobi are the two most commercially active today, although there've been plenty others in the past. Both ePub and mobi are based on HTML, which means the layout options are more limited than print but include some options print never allowed, like hyperlinks.

Publishing ebooks means researching how different programs & devices show ebooks. We don't indent first lines of paragraphs "1/2 inch," because on an iPHone screen, that's a ridiculous amount of space. We don't use colored text because many of our readers are using e-ink screens, which only show greyscale. We have to be careful with internal artwork or tables and charts, because how they look on a laptop reading with Mobipocket Reader is different from how they'll look on the Kindle App on an iPhone, which is different from a PDF on an iPad, and different from an ePub on a 5" e-ink screen.

We have a choice: We can make them look almost the same everywhere by skipping almost all formating choices, and leaving the text in "web layout" of left-aligned, line-between-paragraphs--or we can use some standard printing typography methods, like indented paragraphs with no spaces between them, larger text for chapter titles, centered scene dividers, and cope with the fact that they won't look exactly the same on every device.

We hope they look good on every device--that it's obvious where the scene breaks occur, that the italicized text is italicized regardless of the display font, that the table of contents is usable to navigate around the ebook. We just can't control the exact appearance of the final details; we can only make suggestions. Some of them are pretty strong suggestions, supported by most devices, but every formatting choice has to be balanced against, "is this going to be lost for some readers? Or worse, will it be interpreted badly by some devices?"

Sony readers don't support justified text in ePub; they all have ragged-right margins. Kindle automatically indents paragraphs even if they're specifcally set to left-aligned. Smashwords doesn't support tables at all (not that many books need tables), and its onsite display options don't match the documents uploaded. Mobi doesn't support embedded fonts at all, while Adobe Digital Editions doesn't display some of them. Every time a new ereader or ebook-reading program hits the market, we have to consider how much effort to put into finding out its exact display options and limitations.

This is known as the Tower of eBabel problem, and the only "solutions" currently available is either to declare one hardware-software combination as the "correct" one, and format for that & ignore the other options, or to design a swarm of ebooks for each title, one for each hardware-software combo we can think of, until readers are left with a plethora of choices based on details they find incomprehensible.

We do the best we can with the resources we have. We investigate new software and its limitations (Mobileread is invaluable here), try to find someone with each of the major types of hardware to test our books, and scratch our heads at some of the conversion results. And we wait for ebook technology to reach a point where most books are readable on most devices and show up almost the same on all of them.

Comments

[runpunkrun]

Interesting post! Especially the limitations of each device/program. Though my Sony PRS-350 displays justified text in epubs just fine.

[elf]

Wow, thanks for mentioning that! I may need to get a newer Sony; I have a 505, and had picked up the impression that the "no-justified-text" limitation was continued in the newer devices. (The LRF format supports justified text just fine, but I'm too lazy to convert all my epubs to a proprietary, uneditable format.)

[amalthia]

My I think all Sony devices after the 505 support justified text. I was disappointed when I found out they wouldn't push an firmware upgrade on the 505 to fix this problem. :(

[stormcloude]

The most annoying thing to me about ebooks is the stupid headers with the title, page# and author's name at the top of each page-- because they're never at the top of the page. They end up in the middle of the story and break up the reading flow every few paragraphs. Ugh, so irritating.

[elf]

That comes from either converting from PDF (and not editing out the headers) or reading PDFs in a reflowable device. There's a lot of advice on "how to make the conversion work better," but it all boils down to "edit the file after converting;" we have no software that can detect "headers" on every variation of formatting that PDFs use.

[stormcloude]

Yeah, I convert everything to epub before putting it on my reader. I still wish publishers would quit putting them in at all. Ebooks don't need them.

[elf]

Obligatory rant about legacy elements of print bleeding into the ebook industry:

I hate that PDFs are expected to have headers and page numbers... you don't need them. They're clutter-text filling up margins that should be cropped out entirely. They're a holdover from print--and worse, a holdover from old styles of printing, where all the pages got printed on one big sheet & then cut down, and the headers guaranteed the ability to keep all the bits of a book together. They're irrelevant for POD printing systems, and worse then irrelevant in ebooks.

However, it's $@%&!! about time for ebook hardware mfrs to come up with a useful header/footer system. Kindle comes closest, but still has issues. An ereader should support show-or-hide headers that have the title, author, and page number in tiny text, so when you open your book you've got a reminder--and so you remember that author later.

[yourlibrarian]

Interesting to hear about all the considerations that have to go into formatting. One would have hoped that changing from print to digital would have encouraged publishers to rethink what's actually necessary when it comes to formatting versus what's simply become typical (why is any paragraph indented, for example?) but it seems legacy habits are always very strong when mediums change.

[elf]

A lot of print standards were based on two conflicting goals:
1) Cram as many words on a page as possible, because paper and ink are expensive, and
2) Make it as easy to read as possible, given the incredible number of words they're trying to shove on a page.

Artistic features are secondary. Missing entirely, in cheap publications.

Indented paragraphs are because you need a way to spot the beginning of a paragraph, and that's the least space-consuming one they could come up with. The whole "two spaces after a period" came from monospace typography systems; it's irrelevant in modern publishing.

The extra return between scene breaks is simple and space-saving; more extravagant publications would put in a swirly-bit or other graphic, but paperbacks wasted no effort nor ink on that--and the extra line often gets lost in the transition to ebooks, because the OCR often isn't proofed at all.

Page headers--author name, book title--are designed to make the *printing* process easier; they were never designed to help the reader.

Font sizes on most books are uncomfortably small for reading; we've forced ourselves to deal with 9- and 10-pt single-spaced type because paper costs money and it's easier to learn to read small type than print 400-page novels. But ebooks don't have that constraint, and a lot of people discover it's easier to read them at larger font sizes.

Mainstream publishers have dug their heels in and avoided ebooks as long as they possibly could, fearing (accurately) that ebooks would cut into their precious hardcover sales. So instead of learning how to dominate the ebook industry as they dominated print, by finding out what standards worked best for readability in a world where 100,000-word books don't weigh any more than 10,000-word stories, they let the open source movement do the research for them.

And it's sloppy as hell, but we *are* slowly sorting out what features ebooks do & don't really need to be readable. Indie & self-publisher are pushing the limits of people's expectations and discovering that a lot of the features the big publishing houses believed to be essential, don't matter to most readers.

[yourlibrarian]

But ebooks don't have that constraint, and a lot of people discover it's easier to read them at larger font sizes.

So true, see my answer to amalthia below. In fact, I only just now thought this may be a reason why so many people seem intrigued by my eReader which is nothing special, probably because they're so unaccustomed to see large font in reading material. That's a useful review of the financial constraints of print though.

You know, the other thing that publishers don't seem to be thinking about is how to translate the hardcover/paperback dichotomy to eBooks (in a way other than price that is). For example, for most of my reading, all I care is that something is readable. But if it's a story I quite like and might want to reread, I'd love to have a visually attractive version, with illustrations, scene break art, etc. (thus why Big Bang works can be so appealing). And to some degree there have been print attempts to do things like this with "collector" editions and expensive binding, etc. But eBooks could also benefit from this, and chances are the books that would sell well with those features would already be top sellers (at least in their genre). Yet other than cramming multimedia into texts (which I would personally find of limited appeal), I don't see that this is any kind of plan on their part.

[elf]

Some publishers try to make "apps" out of their bestsellers, turning them into multimedia presentations... that don't work on ereaders.

There's the issue that fancy collector editions are often for sharing, or at least showing off; fancy ebook editions, like all other ebook editions, are officially Only For You. Would you spend an extra $10 for artwork you can't show to anyone else?

And there's the side problem that ereaders don't consistently support formatting. None of the portable readers supports footnotes, even though the ePub spec does. And having chapter headers in a fancy, script-heavy font that beautifully captures the feel of the book is meaningless if it's read on a program that doesn't support that font.

Publishers' real panic-point isn't so much about piracy or digital markets; it's that a major portion of their skills has become nearly obsolete, and at the whims of unknown software designers. They used to be able to put their expertise into the design & layout of books for easy & pleasant reading; "books" were different from "typewritten pages cut in half" even after desktop printers with multiple fonts were everywhere. Now, "ebooks" are often plaintext things, with no leading control, no kerning at all, no font support... I can understand their distress.

They weren't just selling "story content;" they'd put a lot of effort into making the packaging for that content invisible while simultaneously making it compelling. And that whole skill family is now shot to hell.

[amalthia]

I like indents on my 6 inch screen mostly because it means less page turns which use up the battery. I've been in places where I could not easily recharge my reader. I think with computer monitors it's more important to have that space between paragraphs because it makes it easier to read from a distance.

[yourlibrarian]

Ah, yes I can see that being useful. My own font is so enlarged on my reader (a major advantage to me of having one) that I only get a sentence per page if that. So other than paragraph breaks, most formatting is pretty useless to me.

[amalthia]

I love that e-readers give readers more options on how we read. :)