Good read = good books and good design that supports the reader

[felix faber]

Hey there!

If I download a book from PG or use a kindle, the experience is not
pleasant.
Sadly, when it comes to ebooks, much of what is known in the
profession of book-making seems to have been forgotten.

For example
- Page Layout (e.g. http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Typographic-Style-Robert-Bringhurst/dp/0881791326)
- Typography (ligatures, kerning, small caps, ..)
- Line breaking and text justification (Knuth-Plass Algorithm)
- many more details that help the reader .. and that even I don't
notice consciously

We might not be able to tackle all of this right now.
But our approach should be able to _elegantly_ incorporate all of this
one day.

Which information must be present in the master file in order to
enable _good_ design for automated format conversions?
And ... how do we include designers in the process of creating the
technical foundations for good design?

Best,
Julius aka Felix Faber

[Allen Tan]

Hi! I'm a designer and editor. *waaaves*

At the most basic level, having clean text that I can pull into
layouts will be wonderful. There are so many works that people would
jump to do a design for, if they could only find something not-scary-
looking from PG.

What I'm hoping for:
1. A standard design that can be used for anything we pull and
reformat from PG.
2. A set of more specialized designs for particular kinds of works –
for example, poetry, artbooks, etc – to show a comprehensive range of
layouts.
3. On the far end of the spectrum, have a flagship book. It should
have customizations specific to this one work and a sophisticated
layout (meaning, it's dealing with an array of different elements –
images, captions, epigraphs, quotations, chapter pages, etc).
Something that you can point people to and say, “Look. This is what
the project is capable of.”

Allen

On Feb 27, 7:49 pm, felix faber <julius.pfrom...@googlemail.com>
wrote:

> Hey there!
>
> If I download a book from PG or use a kindle, the experience is not
> pleasant.
> Sadly, when it comes to ebooks, much of what is known in the
> profession of book-making seems to have been forgotten.
>
> For example

> - Page Layout (e.g.http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Typographic-Style-Robert-Bringhurst/dp...)

[felix faber]

On Feb 28, 8:16 pm, Allen Tan <al...@tanmade.com> wrote:
> Hi! I'm a designer and editor. *waaaves*

Perfect!

> What I'm hoping for:
> 1. A standard design that can be used for anything we pull and
> reformat from PG.
> 2. A set of more specialized designs for particular kinds of works –
> for example, poetry, artbooks, etc – to show a comprehensive range of
> layouts.
> 3. On the far end of the spectrum, have a flagship book. It should
> have customizations specific to this one work and a sophisticated
> layout (meaning, it's dealing with an array of different elements –
> images, captions, epigraphs, quotations, chapter pages, etc).
> Something that you can point people to and say, “Look. This is what
> the project is capable of.”

Do you think that it is possible to have one or several basic designs
that books get automatically converted into once we have a well-
defined master format?

IMHO we need designs not only depending on the text type, but also on
output format and device.
How do we handle the many different screen sizes that eBooks get read
on?

[Travis Jensen]

On Feb 29, 2012, at 2:54 AM, felix faber <julius....@googlemail.com> wrote:

> Do you think that it is possible to have one or several basic designs
> that books get automatically converted into once we have a well-
> defined master format?
>
> IMHO we need designs not only depending on the text type, but also on
> output format and device.
> How do we handle the many different screen sizes that eBooks get read
> on?

I don't think we should try to solve that problem. I think we should
focus on allowing for the best output *today* (for any value of
today). For our current value, that may mean a single source text and
different style sheets for different devices. For some future value,
it may mean a single source that is completely interpreted by the
client (note that the current iBooks format is somewhere between the
two).

There are a lot of people working on solving that problem, and it may
make sense for us to do so eventually, too. But I would rather start
getting a 50% solution out today.

Tj

[Allen Tan]

On Feb 29, 11:14 am, Travis Jensen <travis.jen...@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Feb 29, 2012, at 2:54 AM, felix faber <julius.pfrom...@googlemail.com> wrote:
>
> > Do you think that it is possible to have one or several basic designs
> > that books get automatically converted into once we have a well-
> > defined master format?
>
> > IMHO we need designs not only depending on the text type, but also on
> > output format and device.
> > How do we handle the many different screen sizes that eBooks get read
> > on?
>
> I don't think we should try to solve that problem. I think we should
> focus on allowing for the best output *today* (for any value of
> today). For our current value, that may mean a single source text and
> different style sheets for different devices. For some future value,
> it may mean a single source that is completely interpreted by the
> client (note that the current iBooks format is somewhere between the
> two).

I'm thinking we could have a single source text that gets converted
into html, epub, mobi, pdf, and anything else people suggest. Each one
of those formats/devices would have a basic design.

I think we should focus on getting to html first, for 3 reasons:
- it's the most full-featured of all the ebook formats, and we can
degrade gracefully for the other types,
- it'll help us think about different screen sizes, and we can make
these designs responsive (media queries, etc) to grapple with these
issues,
- anyone with a web browser can view them, without ereader software.