It's a rainy weekend afternoon in Tokyo, and American expat Craig Mod is sitting in a sleek coffee shop reading a book on his new iPad, test-driving it. But distractions are abound. Not in the crowded coffee shop or out on the colourful Tokyo streets, but right there on his iPad.
He muses: "Distractions come to my attention trying to read on this iPad, such as: sloppy typography, misspelt words, confusing page breaks, widows, orphans, broken tables.
"These and more pull me from the narrative spell. In that moment I realise, although I've had this substantial object of glass and metal for a few weeks, I haven't managed more than ten pages of anything."
Mod, a writer, designer and publisher in his mid-30s, wonders what the problem is.
"It's not the screen - I've happily read several novels on my iPhone," he thinks. "It's not the weight - it feels fine when resting on a table or my knee."
So, what then?
"The problem is much simpler," Mod says, making some mental notes. "iBooks and the Kindle app are incompetent e-readers. They get in the way of the reading experience and treat digital books like poorly typeset PDFs. We can do better.
"We have to do better!"
Mod likes to think about these kinds of questions: What's wrong with current e-readers and how do we rebuild them? What meta-data do we create when engaging with digital text, how can e-readers embrace it and how does that change readers' relationships with books?
Of course, who cares about the e-bookstores are if it's painful to read the e-books in the first place?
Mod again: "I barely prefer the Kindle app over iBooks - it's simply the less horrible of two bads.
"Both of these applications treat e-books little better than cheap PDFs made from scanned physical books. If we want an e-reader capable of fully embracing the digital advantages of our e-books, we need to start rebuilding."
According to Mod, printed books and e-books are both text at their cores. "Book designers long ago established rigorous rules for laying out text blocks so they disappear to the reader," he muses. "They took pride in turning the physicality of a book into a tool for efficiently and elegantly getting information into the mind of the reader. As any good typographer knows: the best typography goes unnoticed."
"Our e-readers [today] seem to have forgotten this heritage. They've forgotten that their core purpose is simply to present text as comfortably as possible; to gently pull the reader into the story. Every other aspect of experiencing a book is predicated on this notion.
Mod wants to see e-readers improve on these core issues:
Hyphenation: Why is hyphenation proving to be so elusive? "Eucalyptus on the iPhone does a fine job with it. If they can, then so should Apple and Amazon," he says, adding: "Hyphenation isn't as big a deal for longer line lengths. But if one advantage of digital books is large font-sizes for the visually impaired, then hyphenation must be implemented. The impact hyphenation has on readability multiplies as the point size increases."
Ragged-right text: "There's something sociopathic about major e-readers not including this option," he says.
Smarter margins: "Line length and margins are intrinsically tied to the type and size of
font being used, and the shape of the page (or screen). Like Instapaper, you could give readers a choice of leading, margins and font size. But readers aren't typographers. They shouldn't have to choose. These are page design fundamentals, based on rational proportions. Our e-reader layout algorithms should be competent in balancing these variables.''
Copy and paste: ''That we can't copy and paste is an insult. The rationale behind this
restriction is obvious: publishers don't want readers to easily extract entire books. It's a form of DRM through obnoxiousness.''
Typesetting: Mod says that currently, printed book typesetting is far more nuanced and elegant
than any Kindle or iBooks edition, adding: "Add to the equation that many digital books are OCR scans with broken tables and sloppy page breaks, and you have to wonder just how anyone thinks they can charge a near equivalent price for an inferior reading experience. A reading experience made inferior not because of the device, but because of a lack of consideration in the presentation. A reading experience that can be made better with a stronger focus on fundamentals."
Mod's mantra is essentially, let's focus on the fundamentals. Improve e-reader typography and page balance. Integrate well-considered networked features.
"Respect the rights of the reader and then - only then - will we be in a position to further explore our new canvas."
Hybird books? The third way?
''The Hybrid Textbook is a prototype that establishes a third form somewhere between the physical page and the screen display, dissolving the separation between physical and digital, and engaging the opportunity for seamless interaction with both. ''
Chris Becker commented on Mod's blog earlier in the year:
"You are on point in discussing the value a book designer / typographer can bring to the print medium and how this value should be transferred over to the screen space with the added affordances of the screen medium, including copy and paste. I can't believe that there isn't a way to attach metadata to e-books that allows copyrighted material to be tagged and traceable back to its original source? I agree with you that it is an insult that the typefaces an e-book can be rendered in are limited. Limiting the typefaces on a screen based medium is like limiting the type of paper in tangible print media to newsprint. Sceen based mediums are already compromising the materialty of the book experience the least they could do is allow the design freedom and expertise of designers to shine through on the screen surface. Allowing the experience to be for the screen medium and not just a replication of the tangible experience. I believe the screen is a fundamentally different than the physical book and therefore content that is developed for e-readers should be produced and even written for that media format.
I recently finished a masters degree at the Art Center College of Design : Media Design Program where I worked on a thesis project called Marginalia ....http://www.chrisrbecker.com...... It explores a world where tangible print media become linked to its digital counterpart rather then replace by it through a screen.
The Hybrid Textbook is a prototype that establishes a third form somewhere between the physical page and the screen display, dissolving the separation between physical and digital, and engaging the opportunity for seamless interaction with both.
Even if I feel there is plenty of room for tangible print media to bridge the digital divide, I think your commentary holds e-books accountable for being something different than its tangible brethren.
great post
"....I think that, like most digital variants on age old analogue design, the current role and focus of e-books needs to be examined with fresh eyes and open minds to take full advantage of the tremendous opportunity for advancement provided not just by the form factor but (perhaps more importantly) the network as well.
[Mod is]correct though, before we even begin to look at implimenting many of the possible features you propose we need to fix what is already broken. "
"Personally, I'm not very excited about reading "print texts" on a screen;
I *am* excited about what native electronic texts can be (and in many cases already are) when writers abandon the limitations of print textuality and actually write toward the potential of electronic textuality.
This is already happening with contemporary electronic literature, where you have works that could not exist in print because they depend on functions achievable with the computer that would be impossible to (re)create with ink on paper.
In these cases, the book metaphor, the software "reader," etc., are meaningless. The works are available on the internet. You access and read them on your computer. Period.
"Yes. A computer controlled screen is not a piece of paper. Mimicking books on these devices is a dead end. I realized this over 20 years ago and conceived of a way to present text to readers in an entirely new way. One that takes advantage of the computer's abilities. You can see a demo of a version of this concept here:''
http://vubotics.com/home.htm
If you could get the gadget to mimic the media it's trying to replace, eg, light slightly flexible dual clamshell screens for pocket book size, and a larger tablet type for magazines and newspapers, then users may feel more comfortable.
Novels are meant to immerse readers in their world, whereas newspapers and magazines would tend to require more interactive features.
Software should be able to fix typesetting failures, and possibly customize the experience to the reader's comfort level.
Also, trying to play or follow a musical piece would also be limited.
However, that does not mean that e readers are all bad. Hyphenation though should be a problem that is easily solved,
Wherefore, the problem of copy and paste might also be argued as "copy write infrigements" which is not so easily solved, thus prices would go up on the books.