By Kassia Krozser
In an earlier piece for Publishing Perspectives, “‘E’ is for Experimentation,” Guy Le Charles Gonzalez makes the point that industry fetishists tend to salivate over bright and shiny things — and honestly, who among us hasn’t ascribed magical properties to the Apple Unicorn, due to be announced this week? Gonzalez thinks 2010 will be a year of experimentation, and I do, too…with reservations. My hope is that experimentation plays second fiddle to getting the basics right.
Guy pointed out that the print book is a pretty efficient format. You won’t get an argument from me, but I have no interest in improving the print experience. I’m looking to improve the reading experience, which to me going forward means getting digital books right.
As an early adopter of e-books, I have invested in the publishing learning curve, but the general sloppiness of the product being released by major publishers devalues the content. Publishers rushing to “enhance” e-books, convinced this will entice readers to fork over more money, would do better if they put more effort into basic quality control and consideration of how the book will be consumed. It is nearly impossible to argue for pricing an e-book on par with the print version when it’s obvious the e-book is a lower quality product.
I don’t hear a lot of readers clamoring for “enhancements,” a concept that seems to be on par with DVD extras. I do hear a lot of frustration about just plain bad e-books. Not the writing, not the editing, the actual books themselves.
It won’t come as a surprise to see that most of the basics noted below relate to production and workflow. The digital version is as “real” as the print version, meaning it needs to be factored into workflow as the book moves from editorial to finished product. This ensures that every version of the book, from the super-duper enhanced version to the plain vanilla digital book to the print edition is optimized for its format and intended audience. It may be time for publishers to introduce “graceful degradation” into their thinking — a concept borrowed from programming, where the book displays properly as it moves from complex to simpler formats.
So what are some basics that need more attention? Here’s a short list :
These are basics, and they’re not being done well by most publishers. I purposely skipped metadata in my list because it’s worth an article of its own. Metadata is key to the next decade of search and discovery, the creation of digital libraries. Bad metadata=no discovery.
Upcoming display technology like Pixel Qi and new devices like the Unicorn have the potential to transform the digital reading experience. Color. Multimedia. Improved web-based reading functionality. Of course, we already have the web, waiting for traditional publishing to take full advantage of what it offers. The basics I note above are what the web is all about.
Sexy technology won’t hide sloppy formatting and poor usability — if anything, it will highlight the problems. Imagine the Unicorn owner, someone whose device is all about web technologies, puzzling over page number references and wondering where the appropriate links are hidden. The basics of e-book production are the foundation for improving the reading experience.
Books like the cookbook noted above can be test subjects for publishers as they seriously consider enhancements. Usability, navigation, using the right medium, introduction of multimedia, and graceful degradation — or the opposite, progressive enhancement — can be practiced and perfected with minimal investment. The book is written, it’s digitized, and all the elements are in place.
Experiment, yes. Fail big, succeed even bigger. But get the basics right. That’s what readers really want.
Kassia Krozser has seen the future and it is good: more people are reading, writing, and publishing than ever before. Kassia consults with publishers about digital publishing opportunities at Oxford Media Works (OxfordMediaWorks.com), and writes about current digital publishing trends at booksquare.com.
DISCUSS: How would you improve e-books?
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How Would You Improve E-books?
6 months ago
[...] Kroszer argues in our lead story today that e-books, despite burgeoning acceptance in the market, are still in need of TLC. Some are [...]
Mick Rooney
6 months ago
[...]Kassia Krozser has written an article today over on Publishing Perspectives about the development of e-books and that it’s time for us to learn to walk before we try to run.[...]
Guy LeCharles Gonzalez
6 months ago
Totally agree that getting the basics right will be critical; in a lot of cases, “good enough” eBooks really aren’t, especially when it comes to basic navigation.
eBooks are still in their brochureware phase, which is why I find the frenzy over enhanced eBooks and the Unicorn so ridiculous. I coach Little League baseball, and it reminds me of the kids who can barely make contact with the ball asking about bunting and stealing bases.
Getting the fundamentals right — which *ahem* includes the print side of the business, aka 80-90% of total revenue for most publishers — while regularly experimenting with new formats, channels and business models is a winning formula for any publisher.
MJRose
6 months ago
Always right on. With cutbacks the lack of staff means all kinds of things like this are missing. Proofreading has also suffered badly….
Jan Whitaker
6 months ago
Very glad to see this discussion. It’s agonizing to see what happens to text and book design on e-readers. I have one but actually prefer to read many books on my computer because they retain their design integrity. Trouble is how readily people will accept poor quality. Because of becoming accustomed to You Tube production values, college film students will tolerate horrid DVD projection on the big screens and have no appreciation of how much better 35mm projection is — the projectors are being thrown out now everywhere as old, worthless technology. If I were a filmmaker or a book designer I’d be in despair.
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6 months ago
[...] very nice post (not surprisingly) by Kassia Krozser on Publishing Perspectives: How about a little back to the basics? points out what every publisher should know but is able to get amazingly [...]
trav
6 months ago
This is sooooo true. I have had to ask for a refund on my last Kindle purchase, there were words MISSING! Unbelievable. I took screenshots and photos of the print-book, while in the bookstore, and sent them to the publisher.
No one in their office had ever seen the book on a Kindle. How can the industry expect to keep moving forward while churning out slack work? They wouldn’t send a print book to press without looking over it… a gazillion times. eBooks should be no different.
The publisher blamed the auto-converting of Amazon’s process, but the fault MUST lie at the publisher’s feet. Every time. We must quit being lazy and fully engage these “auto-conversions”.
Thank you again for stressing the basics of good books and good publishing.
Matt Rowe
6 months ago
Great post! What you’re calling for is a recognition by publishers that ebooks are software: they need to be engineered and tested with their end users in mind. Other industries have figured out that their “content” products need testing (help files, web pages), but many publishers seem to think that if they just dump out their existing content onto a new platform, the platform will make it work. Even the old platforms require engineers (typographers and designers) and testers (copy editors and proofreaders).
What keeps me away from most ebooks is the horrible typography: limited font choice, poor rendition of letter shapes, hideous word spacing and justification, idiotic hyphenation. Even though those are generally platform limitations, it’s possible to work around them–just like people made decent-looking web pages in 1996. You just need to put effort into engineering and testing within the platform limitations.
(And it should probably go without saying, but maybe it wouldn’t: web technology has certainly advanced from 1996 to 2010, but web pages are still crap if you don’t design and don’t test.)
Alain (borax99)
6 months ago
Dead on! A few months back, I decided to wander down Nostalgia Avenue and bought all of the original Ian Fleming James Bond books from the Sony ebookstore. The copyediting was unbelievably poor. Scan and dump indeed, I remember wondering if anyone actually *read* the books after scanning them.
My other pet peeve concerns right justification, it is an absolute must for me, unless we’re talking about a book of poetry or a play. Don’t tell me that the reading experience on your device is “book-like” if the ragged right margins on the latest best-seller make it look like a high-school term paper? (Got that, Sony and Amazon?)
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6 months ago
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Colleen in MA
6 months ago
Great post! We recently brought our eBook production in-house, and when we compared what we could make with the product that the company we had been outsourcing to made, we were blown away. Unlike them, we considered simple formatting decisions and came up with what I think is a better reading experience for our consumer.
I cringe when I think about a potential reader spending a lot of money on an eReader only to come upon a frustrating reading experience. As a designer, it IS hard to let go of formatting decisions and to strip a book down to the bare essentials, but eBooks have to be a content-driven format in order to be portable and so attention does need to be paid to the details that will make the content legible and easily referenced.
Jair
6 months ago
Desculpe, não consegui captar a toatalidade de seu artigo, mas posso lhe adiantar que estou criando e-books com capas especiais (ilustrações) pra eles.
Acho realmente que temos um novo potencial nas mãos, sem esquecer os livros impressos, que sempre existirão, teremos novos textos a preços módicos para esses leitores virtuais. Acho o e-book uma nova forma de leitura,trazendo novas perpectivas para usuários específicos, com novas inserções no modo de se ler um livro.
Acho realmente que o e-book e a internet caminham juntos, ele é filho dela, e por isso mesmo terá toda penetração na nova mídia. Basta para isso pararmos de ver o e-book como um livro. Ele não é um livro. É algo mais.
Jair Domingos de Sousa
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Cathy Macleod
6 months ago
Yes, the basics are being ignored in the rush to digitize. This sloppy attitude will put many people off buying an ebook. DRM (digital rights maintenance)is also offputtting. I resent not being able to copy an ebook from my computer to my handheld portable device.
Henry Odell
6 months ago
Totally agree. This is also related to pricing. Those who think e-books are all the same than p-books but without paper and printing should consider “reading experience”. As webs need to be tested in different browsers, e-books should be tested in different e-readers before selling them.
However, I think the main question is: are you working in a new publishing paradigm? then you may be really worried about the reading experiences of your readers and e-books are a first stop in this process.
Or,do books are still the main focus of your business… well, then you may keep on converting text into electronic format thinking you are going “digitally”. Readers will let you know…
Eoin Noble
6 months ago
As someone who works with epub files from publishing houses on a daily basis, I can only agree. If a fraction of the massive design budget was put into really thinking about navigation and reading experience it would make such a difference. My company has spent a lot of time designing a modern user experience for iPhone ebooks, and it dismays me to see poor-quality epubs being translated into barely readable apps. The phenomenon and mentality of digital page turning is particularly puzzling.
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Gareth Cuddy
5 months ago
Great Article. These are the kind of points I’ve been making to publishers for the last 12 months with very little joy. I’m glad to see someone else can retain a little perspective and a more than healty dose of realism and clarity.
People want to read book son their devices. End of. No all-singing, all-dancing super-dooper versions. Just good quality content. Is that too much to ask?
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5 months ago
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Phil Sevetson
5 months ago
Ms. Krozser,
This is a cogent exposition of a subject I wasn’t even aware of. I’ll be more cautious buying my ebooks in the future.
So far, I’ve mostly bought newly published material, which has apparently all been composed on electronic media — I don’t recall encountering OCR issues on anything I’ve read on the Kindle or the Baen people’s webscriptions.net site. Really, OCR needs a “spill chucker” followed by a careful proofread before you start charging money for the material.
I strongly agree with the position some of the commenters hold — putting fancy “extras” in the digital editions of books, is worse than useless if the basic book isn’t smoothly readable and at least moderately searchable; in fact, I’d go so far as to say that extras when the basics aren’t right is lipstick on a pig. If I had a sufficiently unpleasant reading experience because of poor implementation of digital format, I’d ask for a refund and be very cautious about buying from that publisher again.
Kat
4 months ago
Yes! I just want good books on a portable device. For fiction, I have no interested in value-added stuff — no multimedia features, not even illustrations (unless it’s a graphic novel.) If it’s something other than a book, fine, but as a fiction reader, I don’t want any distractions from the words.
The extra noise will pull me straight out of the story — the last thing I want. And the interface problems / typos / etc do the exact same thing. It’s not nitpicking to criticize these errors; though they are small, they make a big dent in the audience’s experience.
Honking typos and bad formatting instantly create distrust that can’t be regained. The reader will always be on guard and disengaged from the story. Clearly, publishers are not their own customers. Otherwise, they would also get frustrated with these obstructions to a functional story experience.
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4 months ago
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Tami Jackson
3 months ago
I’m a fellow blogger and thought it would be great to follow you (blog-to-blog). Meanwhile I don’t see that option here? I did “follow” you on FaceBook, however. I’ll see you on Twitter too (I’m @AlmightyPen).
GREAT SITE!