Apple kills fonts in iBooks, strikes blow to standards
pigsgourdsandwikis.com
pigsgourdsandwikis.com
Understand this, it isn't a _technical_ issue. It's a user experience issue and a "what is a book" issue.
The web is a horror show for a _good_ designer, especially one that values good typography. The things that bad designers do online, even for major, big dollar sites give me nightmares. I'm not talking about "pretty" or "arty" or even elegance. I'm talking about basic readability stuff.
Like it or not, for a while most eBooks are going to be churned out en masse by sullen, angry publishers that don't want to spend a dime on the tech that they are (correctly) afraid is going to eat their lunch. They are going to have a big auto-scripted sausage grinder cranking out pasty white tubes of text tied off at irregular intervals. I suspect that Apple is simply trying to make sure these tubes are boiled and sanitary, at least from a typographical point of view. (Sorry for the metaphor, I'm in a mood...)
Books with non-specific formatting, which includes most fiction, the primary market target for Apple in this endeavor, are going to be readable, if not elegant. Notice what they are doing with Safari and their new "Reader" feature? Maybe they are planning to train their users to throw the "kill switch" on stupid design, and after a while they'll add a similar feature to iBooks, and turn the fonts and formatting back on. Or maybe not. His Steveness is fairly inscrutable...
The good news is that if you are a control freak (and what designer isn't, another reason for the lock down) then you can simply design for PDF. Which, if you require actual layout control, and not just typographical control, is a world class standard (one with LOTS of design options.)
Having said all that, a well designed book is a beautiful thing and a joy to read. Not because you are marveling at the design, but because you probably don't even notice it.
No, it really isn't. If Apple really wants to force standard formatting on them, they can do what they did in the browser, and have a "readability"-type button. They've already solved this problem.
As someone else mentioned, they might as well use the browser to begin with.
(Imagine, trying to avoid the typographical and layout nightmare that is the world wide web while you are trying to grow a business.)
Look, the Reader "solution" has many problems. Surf around and try it out for a while. Plus people are already complaining that it is an example of Apple's iron heel of "user experience" being forced upon the world. Oh! That's what people are saying about the iBook problem...
Apple doesn't need to and, frankly, is largely unable to curate the web. There's already lots of users who are used to dealing with poor design. This is not the case with books, or at least fiction books, which are not heavily formatted and typographically simple (we call it elegant...) People expect to just open them up and start reading and not have to figure things out. You start allowing complicated layout and interactive CSS and I guarantee you we'll start seeing book with navigation menus and other foolishness.
Apple is simply trying to make it dead simple for frightened publishers and weenie techheads to make a simple, commercially viable fiction book that users will tolerate while creators are learning about the finesse and subtlety of digital book design.
Either way this gets implemented, lacking a lot of educations on both sides of the digitally rendered page, there are going to be unhappy people.
Then make their own format, separate it from ePub. ePub is a ebook standard that pre-exists Apple's foray into book publishing. Make their own standard and don't call their reader ePub compliant.
They're making the IE5 of eBook readers....
To my knowledge Apple isn't extending the standard at all. Is Apple _adding_ anything to the standard? Isn't the DRM (grrrrrrrrrr) that Apple's adding covered under the standard?
Yes. But remember: PDF is still evil. Go for PS instead.
The biggest problem with PDF is that it usually requires a specific page orientation and aspect ratio, if not a specific page size. This is okay if you have a large enough display and can resize your viewer window to suit, but it's a bit more of a problem on smaller displays, or irregular shaped or resolved displays. For those, a liquid layout and typographic styling, something like HTML or ePub makes much more sense.
But--similar to WiFi relying on special purpose encryption instead of using standard algorithms--PDF is bigger than compressed PS (e.g. .ps.gz).
I expect that of Sony, but I'm surprised that Apple of all companies don't have people that really care about these details on the team.
It's not as good at H&J as you would be doing it by hand, but I've yet to see a river anything like those that snake through iBooks pages.
I love the look of Eucalyptus and haven't seen any other reader that comes close (particularly at the iPhone/iPod screen size and resolution, and ESPECIALLY given that as far as I can tell they use the .txt versions of the Gutenberg files). It's not that they've sacrificed the right goats to the gods of text presentation magic, it's just that they actually give a damn what the output looks like.
That's an extremely applicable point in many respects. I'm surprised that Apple of all companies don't have people -- senior ones at that -- that are on the verge of open revolt over the direction (http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/06/eff-nothing-new-about-i...) in which the company has been taking personal computing lately.
Whether or not ePub lets a book designer choose a font is not up to Apple. ePub is a published standard that Apple pretends to support. The point of the article is that Apple lets book designers choose fonts for many elements in a book, but not all. This is completely non-standard and will lead to hacks.
Whether you would like Apple to choose 6 fonts for you to choose from, or book designers to offer different choices is completely beside the point. Or at the very least, a very different point.
The person who criticized the article for that isn't going to see this comment. Don't write manifestos defending yourself to the general public, reply to specific comments on specific points.
Anything else is a waste of time.
"Serif, ew!!" tells me everything I need to know about not letting designers like this control my eBooks.
If that's what they want to do, then they should call it a proprietary format and let people choose whether they want to use it, not have their cake and eat it too.
(If the former, that's a lousy standard, right there)
It throws off formatting for a lot of books if you screw with that sort of thing. Which is what Apple is doing.
If I buy a book, I want to get the book how the publisher, editor, author, and designer intended. It is wrong for Apple to intentionally change the display of the book from the design that was intended. If you want to override the styling in your books, fine, but this shouldn't be mandated.
As I said below, perhaps the specified fonts should be a default with alternatives in a menu, but until then, it's vastly preferable that they use the reader's font and not the book's.
This isn't a printed book, as the woeful justification should prove. Designers don't get nearly as much control.
(Ultimately, I think they will offer an option to use the specified fonts. There's so much wrong with iBooks it feels like the most unfinished 1.0 product out of Apple since Aperture)
As for putting them in the browser: a vanilla browser is possibly the worst way to display seriously large amounts of plain text. By the time you've added all the custom elements needed for good reading, you're at a full app anyway. It could be a web app, sure, but that's a different discussion.
I am not suggesting a vanilla browser at all. I am suggesting putting all of the browsing-like functionality (books, newspapers, arbitrary hypertext) in the same application. I don't care whether it is compiled-in, a plugin, or a web app but if it's not even in the browser then it's a bad user experience from my perspective. I want a unified reading experience. I want unified search shortcuts. I want unified bookmarks and hyperlinks in books that open web pages in tabs.
Forcing users to switch apps for a data format that accomplishes most of the same things that the Web accomplishes diminishes the value of the format to the user. Application balkanization is not the answer and the fighting between vendor and publisher over page styling has already played out in the browser.
Do you mean me? I'm not the author of the post.
While the maximum quality might have been better with the alternative, the minimum and average/median quality will be consistently better with Apple's choice. I shudder to think that I might pay for a book only to find out that it is typeset in justified Comic Sans (or Marker Felt ...) with no tracking, and whichever atrocities the publisher might maul the text proper with.
PDFs are perfect at only one layout, and font size. At different ones it is just horrible. It doesn't work right on an iphone-android small screen.
When designers choose fonts, it only works at one size, at different ones, areas seems different with the same font.
On the web I use readability (http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability) a lot. I am happy to be able to read with fonts readable for me. If I could I'll always surf using readability.
For books I believe overriding designer choice by _yours_ is the best solution for a good read.
Mobipocket (what kindle has) is a different standard. Amazon is mobipocket compliant.
Fortunately for me, I like the Kindle's font, so I don't consider it an issue for the type of reading for which I use the device.
http://forums.digitaltextplatform.com/dtpforums/entry.jspa?e...
Are all the kindle supported html tags.
Basically, Apple is doing exactly what Microsoft did with their early versions of IE6, where they rendered web pages differently than the others out there. They're ignoring a tag that's part of a standard because they think it looks better.
It isn't like you can say font=comic sans in an ePub book and expect it to take effect. What they're doing though is disallowing the setting of font families for certain types of tags.
And yet, the author shows an example of proper behavior using Arial for the book’s body text, and Trebuchet in a garish red to mark up the screenshot. There are many beautiful fonts, but these are not two of them.
Edit: see http://www.ms-studio.com/articlesarialsid.html as to why Arial is so inferior to it’s predecessor, Helvetica.
Still probably not a good choice for the body of a text.