This is actually a _very_ complicated issue, and while I frown disapprovingly at this, I don't completely agree that what Apple is doing isn't right. At least for now.
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.
You're right, it's a dead simple issue. I don't know what came over me, or all the other people discussing this with much sound and fury.
(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.
>Understand this, it isn't a _technical_ issue. It's a user experience issue and a "what is a book" issue.
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.
It's my understanding that Apple is supporting a _subset_ of the ePub standard, as are most of the readers. I don't know of _any_ reader that supports the whole standard. If you do, please point it out as I would love to play with it.
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?
The thing that worries me most, is that Apple wants to control everything. Maybe even with good intent, but there is no such thing as a good dictator - see the apps the banish at the app-store.
> 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.)
Yes. But remember: PDF is still evil. Go for PS instead.
From a user's point of view, PDF is a good experience, at least for highly formatted documents. By this I mean documents for which the specific layout, placement, and aspect ratio is an integral part of the authorship. A comic book/comic strip or a diagram meant to be viewed a certain way are examples of this. Lots of the technical books I have are designed such that to change their visual presentation would require changing the actual content. Like it or not, there's tons of pre-existing content designed for a specific presentation, and PDF (or postscript) are a good choice for that.
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.
Yes, it does. My comment was meant comparing PDF and PS purely as languages. PDF is basically a premature optimization of PS: They replaced the plain text PS commands with binary commands in PDF. That makes PDF on average smaller than PS.
But--similar to WiFi relying on special purpose encryption instead of using standard algorithms--PDF is bigger than compressed PS (e.g. .ps.gz).
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.