Ebooks and Type-casting

A Wired article on Why E-Books Look So Ugly had some insight into the limitations of Kindle and some other readers as they evolve.

I’d always wondered about those little blurbs on the type font used in a book that I sometimes saw appended to the last page.  Who cared that much?

But it matters as part of the reading experience, and this article covers why.

I especially noted one section:

“A big part of the problem with the Kindle (the largest selling e-books reader) is its use of the Amazon-specific .mobi file format, rather than the open standard ePub. ePub is based on the XML and CSS standards used in millions of web pages and allows for far more control over layouts than is currently possible with the .mobi file format.

As a result, if publishers want to sell Kindle books, producers like Defendini have to do a lot of manual work to create the digital file. In some cases, that means almost page-by-page customization, ensuring that drop caps appear correctly and that text flows around illustrations properly.”

So I guess the apparent high price of e-books isn’t entirely about profit — it actually takes more work, even for text with no hyperlinks.

Given the formatting that needs to be done to allow viewing on different screens (your Kindle 1/2/DX, Sony, iPod Touch or iPhone, netbooks, etc.), it looks like a standard that allows the flexibility of something like CSS (and then boilerplate the CSS loaded for each screen format) is going to be important.

Learned something new!