With all the interest over publishers producing e-books for mobile devices (ranging from Kindle, Sony’s e-book reader, cell phones, and other e-book readers) you would think that a publisher would have produced a book on designing e-books for mobile devices. But I can’t find one. Am I missing something?
Maybe part of the problem is that most e-books aficionados at this stage seem to feel that book design, layout, and typography are irrelevant in an e-book world. They say, “Those are things best left to the user to control.” Of course, for years we’ve heard the same argument applied to Web sites. And, yet, there are many books about Web site design. There’s even a very good book on Mobile Web Design.
Perhaps there should be a book on mobile e-book design. Or, does e-book design really differ that much from Web site design?
Let’s examine some of the assumptions and concepts guiding the current incarnation of e-books for mobile devices.
The User Selects
This is what some call the “leave it to the reader” approach. The philosophy that the reader knows best what works for his eyes with regards to control of font size, typefaces, etc. Of course, good Web design allows a reader to increase text size to a certain extent but Web designers provide a starting point by selecting typefaces & font size that form part of a site’s specific design.
And there’s CSS
When knowledgeable e-book enthusiasts are asked about design limitations with regards to the emerging e-book standard, ePub, there’s invariably the glowing statement, “But you can use CSS to format the e-book as you desire.” ….the sound of tires screeching…. Anyone who has used CSS extensively can tell you that CSS can be a complex and challenging beast, particularly in the ways that different browsers support CSS. Will that be any different with the variety of mobile e-book devices? Heck, even Kindle doesn’t support ePub. And do all ePub devices behave the same with regards to display?
CSS does allow for remarkable functionality and I’m a great fan of CSS, though certainly no master of CSS. (Actually, I think there’s only a hundred or so CSS masters in existence on this planet.) I enjoy working with CSS, and it might be fun to play around and see just how far we can take e-book design in a direction that provides a great reading experience for the user. But that also takes a lot of work, which leads to the next topic.
The content conversion cost factor
There is a cost factor for publishers to convert content into an e-book format for mobile devices. Incidentally, it must be noted that there is not a cost factor for converting content into PDF since (for most publishers) PDF is already a by-product of the book design process. That’s an important factor and something that we’ll revisit later.
Certainly an e-book can be created without a lot of fuss, but how good does it really look? And does that really matter? After all, I remember in the mid-1990s that there were people who preferred surfing the Web with their terminal-screen Lynx browsers. There are always many people who are happy with whatever.
But there are many people who want their books (even their e-books) to look great. That’s an important factor to these readers. Some e-book fanatics will say that those people just need to get over their nostalgia for print and get on with the times. But the people who care about the look-and-feel of books are also people who buy a lot of books. That’s a market segment that publishers might care a lot about.
So how do publishers cost-effectively convert into formats both acceptable to Kindle (which can’t be ignored) and other e-book reading devices?
Is this 1993?
At this stage of the e-book technology life cycle (and I think we’re still in the early years of these products), perhaps publishers can just convert to an acceptable e-book format for books that are text only and realize that further conversions will be necessary down the road.
Can someone point me to a Web site from 1993 that is still available? Well, here’s a Web site I created in 1993.
You know what? I bet that site might look really good on some of these small, portable devices that we’re using for reading e-books today.
What about e-books in 2023?
Web site design has come a long way in 15 years. So has technology. In 1993 I remember that one of my colleagues had an Apple Newton. He was so cool.
Only a fool would believe that today’s Kindle and similar devices for reading e-books will not change significantly over the next 15 years. What will e-books and reading devices be like in 2023? No one really knows but there are bound to be some exciting developments with both e-ink and display screens that will further revolutionize the way that we read e-books.
What happens when…
What happens when there is a tablet-sized display supporting e-ink? Or, when mini-notebook computers with tablet screens reach a low-cost point? Or perhaps even flexible tablet-sized e-ink screens? Technological advances might very well surpass today’s limitations.
Tablet size…. What would happen to the e-book market if a thin, light-weight tablet device (either e-ink or LCD display) with a 12″ screen became affordable? Is this likely by 2023? Is anyone betting against it?
When type of device comes onto the market, it will truly revolutionize digital publishing.
But if you have a reading device with such a large screen, then do you need an e-book format that is based on reflow? Or, will that old by-product of print publishing - PDF with all its advanced layout that retains the “high fidelity” of a printed book - be the most common format for e-books? Which format will be chosen by people who buy a lot of books?
Likewise, such a device will change the way people read other materials, especially Web sites, and offer new opportunities for re-crafting what we now call a book. In this scenario, a book is no different than a Web site. And book design is no different than Web site design.
But monetizing a Web site is difficult and publishers certainly yet haven’t figured out how to package and monetize content as Web site, so that’s a big challenge for publishers. But with the prevalence of large-screen e-book reading devices that can support PDF, then many publishers can happily remain in the book selling business even when most books are digital.
Of course, there will always be some people who prefer to read only on a smaller device. That market will not go away, but if the Kindle of 2023 has a color 12″ screen….
Of course, by that time, perhaps Amazon will have bought Sony or some other hardware manufacturer and the Kindle has morphed into a general purpose, always wireless, portable PC.
All this effort today…
Technology forecasting is always prone to errors and everyone knows that you really can’t plan for more than two or three years out (and often not that). But technology management is a lot about strategy.
Getting books into a standard XML-based format such as ePub might be a good strategy for certain publishers. For other publishers, I’m not so sure. And I say that based on years of experience in working with markup languages, going back to the days of SGML. This post already has gotten too long, so I’ll address those issues in another post as well as further examining some of the topics covered here.
Don’t get me wrong…I have nothing against today’s generation of e-book reading devices. But that’s not the entire future of e-books.
