Well, even putting aside my ongoing meditations on the value of the permanent and physical compared to the ephemeral and digital and the serious privacy and ownership issues with digital books in particular, there are purely aesthetic concerns.
And it's nice to see someone else is paying attention to them.
How can so little care be given to the presentation of text on a[n electronic] page? Do publishers care, or even realize, what is happening to the texts they lovingly commission, copy-edit, and proof-read, when they enter the electronic domain?
I wonder, especially if they sub-contract the ebooking of their print files to Amazon, rather than apply quality control themselves.
Digital lends itself to this sort of cavalier content abuse, whether it be wonky typography in an ebook or a lossy 128 bit MP3 file of a song.
A format lacking physicality will always be prey to the cheapest/easiest/fastest mentality.
6 comments:
It's perfectly possible, even easy given modern technology, to make a beautiful, readable, delightful e-text. But as one who has tried to turn his lovingly- and professionally-laid-out self-published books into Kindle texts can tell you, the powers that be haven't really put much into making this happen. If there's a way to make your "eBook" look better than something designed for Netscape 2.0, they aren't very forthcoming about it.
amazon bottom line > your text.
=P
It's simple, it's seductive, and everybody's doing it, so what's with the whining?
"A format lacking physicality will always be prey to the cheapest/easiest/fastest mentality. "
Folks digitizing out of print vinyl to .flac might disagree.
Individuals aren't companies- enthusiasts and collectors will always do what they do.
Commercial entities don't care about the end result except as it relates to the bottom line- if they can get away with DRM on mp3s or shitty page layout on ebooks, that's what they'll do until someone makes them stop.
As long as uncritical folk swallow whatever they're fed, the corps will happily feed them gruel.
Agreed. It's not necessarily the medium. It's the corporate monster using crappy ones or avoiding/misusing good ones.
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