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Comment by gsnedders | Hacker News Reader

I know several people on the publishing side around the digital publishing groups around the W3C, but a large part of the problem is most of the companies making the popular readers (both those with strict hardware/software integration, like most eInk readers, and those without, like most phone/tablet/computer-based readers) simply have no interest in participating or improving the quality of their readers (as fundamentally they don't believe there's a business case for it).

Those who work for publishes lament this endlessly, because lack of software support for certain features limits the quality of what they can publish. (And note for several major publishers their print editions are nowadays typeset from HTML/CSS using Prince.)

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> And note for several major publishers their print editions are nowadays typeset from HTML/CSS using Prince.

Interesting, having played around with wkhtmltopdf and Puppeteer, I had no idea any HTML-to-PDF renderers would be a viable option for publishers, but their examples are pretty impressive – definitely more than any e-readers manage!

> as fundamentally they don't believe there's a business case for it

And they’re probably right. I imagine very few people avoid e-books because of their typographical shortcomings. The arguments I hear against them tend to be on a more fundamental level (‘I prefer to be able to feel the paper’), and even people like me who do notice bad typography put up with e-readers. Publishers meanwhile may well care about their readers’ experience, but they can’t afford not to sell digital copies.

So I understand that typography probably doesn’t make much of a difference to the bottom line of e-reader manufacturers, I just wish the bottom line weren’t the only incentive for large companies.

Prince is purpose-built for paged media and non-real-time rendering, so it can make plenty of performance tradeoffs that neither WebKit (and wkhtmltopdf) nor Blink (and Puppeteer) can, along with having far more engineering resources caring about the paged media case and edge-cases there.

It's not cheap, but if you're a publisher I imagine the cost savings of not having to deal with multiple formats (one for print, one for digital) outweighs that many times over, provided you can get good enough results.

I do wonder if any publishers will get into the e-reader space, especially on the software-only side. But it's not an easy market to get into and the costs are pretty high, and I think both of us are dubious as to how much any user actually cares.

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