As specialists in book cover design, as well as page layout, we’ve long been on the fence about e-books (as incarnated in the form of Kindle & the like). But we’re jumping in and will soon offer e-book design as part of our core book design services.

We enter e-book design with great frustration, not out of any quaint allegiance to print but with annoyance that manufacturers of e-book reading devices don’t grasp that we are now in the third decade of the Web. The current technologies underlying the Web offer tremendous flexibility for crafting beautifully designed sites, incorporating a range of media already supported on multiple devices. Designing on the Web is technology-driven, and the technology is robust. On the Web (as in print) designers have the tools to create superb works, limited only by the skills of the designer.

We wish to create e-books with the tools at hand. Instead, Amazon and Sony (along with a mushrooming mass of imitators) are transporting us back to a stage of technology development that resembles the early 1990s. I was developing Web pages in 1993 and can’t help but experience flashbacks every time I dive into formatting an e-book for either Kindle or EPUB.

That’s no knock against format, either Kindle or even EPUB. These formats are essentially HTML & CSS (though a limited subset). My primary irritation is the way e-book reading devices render HTML & CSS and the corresponding ways that publishers think of e-books based on this model.

If an e-book (as defined by Kindle, EPUB, etc.) is basically a group of HTML pages styled with CSS and bundled for offline reading (with or without a DRM wrapper), then is it really so difficult to implement a rendering engine that supports HTML & CSS as we use it today on the Web?

Meanwhile, I’ll try to temper my moaning about the limitations of e-book devices, though I feel like I’ve been through this before.

In the early years of the Web, designers stayed on the sidelines. Sites were designed by programmers (myself included) or self-taught designers. Eventually, people who really understood graphic design and visual communications entered Web design, and we have a more beautiful online world. And that, too, will happen with e-books. And, someday, the people who really understand reading and writing in digital media will step in, freeing the e-book from its linear, text-oriented form, and helping us recognize that there’s more to offer than merely converting 300-page narratives to e-ink.

How long to wait? There’s a collective sense that the only hardware manufacturer who has ever understood design and the digital life (Apple) will snap us all out of our preoccupation with the current life form of e-books with a portable device that more fully supports the display of a bundled set of Web pages styled with CSS. We’ll see. Now, back to messing around with the Kindle.

Usability authority Jakob Nielsen has a very good article about Kindle Content Design & identifies that “Kindle works poorly for non-fiction books that have many illustrations or that require users to frequently refer back and forth between sections. Even if Kindle had a color screen, heavily illustrated books would still be better in print because moving around in Kindle is awkward.”

Nielsen believes that “the ability to inspire deep thinking is why non-fiction books still have value compared with websites….”

Relationship to book design? Designing a non-fiction book is much more stimulating to a book designer than designing a book of fiction since non-fiction offers many more elements for engaging the reader, e.g., diagrams, images, block quotes, pull quotes, captions, sub-headings. These elements all add a level of interaction with the content that changes the way a person reads a book.

Yet, this enriched interaction with a text does not translate smoothly to reflowable e-book formats (e.g., Kindle, ePub, etc.).

To compensate Nielsen advises, and I think this is a very important statement in his article:

“For Kindle, it’s certainly unacceptable to simply repurpose print content. But you can’t repurpose website content, either. For good Kindle usability, you have to design for the Kindle. Write Kindle-specific headlines and create Kindle-specific article structures.”

Read this part again: “But you can’t repurpose website content, either.” There’s an irony behind that since the underlying format behind Kindle & ePub is HTML & CSS.

Well, this should certainly keep writers, editors, and designers busy. But is it cost-effective for a publisher?

Or are lower-cost, mostly automated, quick-&-dirty conversions good enough for users that prefer mobile devices and reflowable text? Or, good enough for now until this market shakes out over the course of the next few years and we all see what device and formats are really going to dominate? In 5 years perhaps the Kindle will be nothing more than a netbook, and in that case we’re back to using PDF and/or designing for Web browsers and creating a stylesheet for mobile devices.

Is This Insanity?

From a strategic standpoint the difficulty of a publisher designing for the Kindle is that in the mid-1990s we entered an age of continuously redesigning content. Or as Nielsen says, “It’s simply the 1995 lesson updated to a 2009 device.” And I’m only referring to digital content, not the porting of print to digital. But what happens with the 2010 device, the 2011 device, the 2012 device? Evolving technological capabilities have kept Web designers gainfully employed for years now.

As a person running a design firm I should be an enthusiastic champion for specifically redesigning books for Kindle. But just as Web sites are often redesigned every few years to incorporate new features offered by advances in technology, will we see e-books redesigned every few years? Or should the focus be elsewhere, such as thinking about how to create original digital content that doesn’t have a corresponding print component? Or perhaps the print component of digital content is a deeper, more engaging examination of the topic? Or any of several other possibilities. But continually redesigning the same material into different formats isn’t progress.

We’vet just finished the e-book guide 4 Perfect Days in Buenos Aires. It was a process full of questioning many things that are, should or could be different from printed books. (Another post will address why PDF and not some other format for this e-book.)
Here I’ll share some of the topics that we came across while working:

ORIENTATION: portrait or landscape?

By thinking that we are designing a ‘book’ the impulse is always to go with a known book format (portrait), but since the screen is landscape, it’d be useful to follow that format if the e-book is intended to be read on screen.
However, when we read a print book we are always looking at a landscape format from the moment we open the book: the double page. So finally, I decided to go landscape, but as double page to keep the book familiarity and avoid the feel of a PowerPoint presentation.

Should we use COLOR or B&W?

Should we do it full color? We can! So why not?

A full color e-book can be done for the same price and will be more attractive since it’s full of graphics… ok, let’s think about the audience: what if the people want to actually print it and take it with them? Remember this is a tourist guide!
WHAT TO DO? We decided to work on 2 versions: a screen version with images & full color for people to enjoy, read and look at while planning the trip; and a print version that is B&W with a simpler layout. So by printing 11 letter-size pages of the print version then the reader can have the complete text to go.
Here an example of the screen version and the print version:

One complicated part we encountered was a double page with an architectural walking tour that included buildings photos: in this case we just left the map in the print version with references (so people could find the buidings) without images and included the text of that section:

To keep the feel of the book, the print version has the same text orientation (landscape), so by slightly modifying the original grid it was ready:

TYPOGRAPHY: screen font or book font?

I wanted a font family that could be used for the whole project, including the print version. The Rotis family was the choice because of the maximum readability and many options to combine the different levels of hierarchies of headings and text. The main text is set in Rotis Sans Serif and the headings are Rotis Serif & Rotis Semi Serif.

With or without LINKS?

I find it useful when a multi-page document (e-book in this case) has anchors from the Table of Contents linking to the corresponding pages in the e-book. Also since this is an e-book all Web sites mentioned in the e-book are actual links embedded in the document.

COVER

To be consistent with the landscape look of the whole project, the cover was done in the same style, so when opening the document all the pages are the same size, including the cover.

Book design will diverge down several paths and has a surprisingly healthy future.

1) E-books based on a reflow format (i.e., suitable for small devices) will be based on common style sheets and exhibit a fairly uniform appearance. There will be a set of small (in size) firms that customize and refine these style sheets. Publishers will mostly outsource the format conversion since the ever changing variety of devices requires continual reformating of material. There will be some firms that profit very well from providing this service.

2) E-books based on PDFs also will be very popular due to the variety of light-weight computing devices with large screens. (The whole PDF vs reflow format for e-books is misleading unless one assumes that small, palm-sized devices will completely replace all other forms of desktop, notebook, and tablet-sized computers.)

3) Some material traditionally only published in book format will shift to Web delivery and “book” design for this genre actually is Web design. Many challenges for publishers in this segment who have not yet figured out how to monetize Web sites. (If publishers have not figured that out in the last 15 years, will the next 15 years be much different?) Many opportunities for new publishing firms to emerge to fill the gap for producing and monetizing engaging content using digital media. Many opportunities for designers since elegant Web design is neither simple nor cheap.

4) Print-on-demand establishes a significant market operating in bookstores, libraries, big-box retail outlets, and direct shipping to consumers. All those books still need designing and the PDF byproduct can feed directly into pathway #2 above as well as #1 with conversion services offered in pathway #1.

5) Print book designers will still flourish as some publishers will realize that a niche audience is willing to pay a premium for a wonderfully designed book, heralding a surprising renaissance in book design. Also, print book designers can design PDF-based e-books with no problem since PDF is usually a byproduct in the print book design process.

Regular readers will not that I continue to push back against the dire warnings that e-books will replace print books. My resistance comes not because I’m a bookman (which I’m not) but because sweeping, generalized statement leave out so much.

Everyone points to how cars replaced horse-drawn carriages, but there are so many examples where a new technology did not replace previous methods. Yes, e-books will shift print books, publishing, and booksellers in new directions but that doesn’t mean the eradication of print.

In the 1800s the public lecture was a popular and effective way to convey information. Radio did not entirely replace the gathering of individuals to hear someone speak. Cinema did not replace theater. DVD replaced VHS but not movie theaters. MP3s replaced CDs, cassettes, 8-tracks, & vinyl but none of that replace live concerts.

Moving-going, attending concerts and lectures: those are all communal activities but reading is not. In that way, reading is more akin to the solitary viewing of a movie at home or listening to music on an iPod. Yet, when we go to the movies, or sit through the performance of an opera, we process that experience in solitary ways, as individuals. Part of our sensory experience may feed from the audience (particularly at a rock concert) but much of our pleasure at enjoying movies in a theater or a classical concert stems from the environment of the theater and other perceptions. Who is not annoyed at that guy talking two rows over? (And, honestly, I do have to say that I can think of very few lectures that I have enjoyed in person. For that, please, please just give me the lecture on YouTube.)

There are ways that we interact with books through typography, design, and the format of print itself that are so successful that it’s practically transparent to most. For many books – and I don’t say all – print will remain the most effective medium because the book itself has a form that suits our senses.

In a decade or two from now, with advances in digital displays, this will certainly change but I still doubt that even by 2025 we will have seen the complete absence of print books. I know I must sound like a Luddite to all those who are convinced that everyone – right now – should be reading books on their iPhones.

What I do expect is that digital media will create new forms of interacting with a large body of textual and image-based material (the common ingredients of books), ways that go far beyond what we see with the current generation of e-book reading devices. Yet, the capabilities of rich Internet-based digital media have been with us for more than a decade now and, honestly, we’ve not seen a very significant shift towards utilizing this new media in creative and impactful ways. For that, I do blame academia and publishing. There’s a lot more that needs to be done and it will probably come about with the generation that was born into a world where digital media is not considered “new”.

We need to learn what it means to write with digital media.
We need to learn what it means to read a digital text that is not an e-facsimile of a book.