Discuss: Web Standards for E-books

by Joe Clark

1 Great article

I’m currently researching the possibilities in e-books and this article helped me to clear out the answer i should give our clients.

posted at 08:16 am on March 9, 2010 by gijs

2 Page numbers

E-books break the page numbers and the topic was not discussed.
I saw no good solution yet to that issue.
How can we get rid of the page numbers for a human ?
Should we get rid of the page numbers ?

posted at 10:47 am on March 9, 2010 by hoa

3 Re: Page numbers

Page numbers almost certainly need to go.

Page numbers are tied to a certain fixed page size. E-books do not and should not have fixed page sizes — the user may want to change the font size (and the font face, too) or read the book on a larger screen. So if page numbers were to stay, they would have to be re-generated on the fly.

Suppose now reader software allows you to scroll one line up. Are you now on page 199.98?

Also, having page numbers allows one to refer to them. “In the book ‘War and Peace’, page 472…” Page 472 in which page size, font size, and page orientation? Even for print books, such a reference has to be disambiguated with a specific print.

Page numbers are meaningless. Instead, we should refer to chapters, sections, subsections, paragraphs and sentences; and, for well-structured text, to anchors.

Tables of content and indexes should better be handled by reader software (what’s so difficult in collecting all headings from a correctly marked-up book?), and cross-references can use anchors.

posted at 11:32 am on March 9, 2010 by yurikhan

4 standard?

The concept of standard is very away from editorial production logic. And many printed books have complex layout, like school books or manuals. The production of contents is not linear, and dont rely to Word or other tools. The final concent is assembled in a DTP program like XPres or Indesign.
For this books, simply XHTL/CSS is not enough. And also working in a clean manner with Indesign result is a bet. And also if code is valid, is necessary verify all because images flow around, or at bottom of document.
So, this approach work only with simple design, linear text and few or no one image.

posted at 12:52 pm on March 9, 2010 by Livio Mondini

5 Art formatting

Thank you for the discussion—you’ve cleared up several questions I have as a potential content provider.

I’ve been trying to research app standards in regard to graphics files, as well. ARE there any as to resolution, pixel dimension, screen ratios, format, etc.? Do standard web screen resolutions apply for teeny-tiny viewing screens?

We picture book illustrators are used to a standard print format of 32 pages—is there any corresponding “average” length (number of screens?) for original content?

Thanks!

posted at 01:05 pm on March 9, 2010 by BonnieA

6 The City & The City

The non-Shortcovers EPUB edition of The City & The City I read didn’t have any of the problems you described. It appeared to have been produced by InDesign (implying some degree of manual work) and even embedded a font which contain glyphs for all of the unusual characters used.

Not that ebook production doesn’t have problems right now, but I think Shortcovers is a bit worse than the norm.

posted at 02:42 pm on March 9, 2010 by llasram

7 RE: Page Numbers

Putting aside the question of whether or not page numbers are useful for e-books, it’s not true that e-books do not support fixed page numbering. Epub provides a method to map the specific page numbers so that the e-book page numbers will correspond to print page numbers (see here: http://blog.threepress.org/2009/11/26/adobe-page-map-versus-ncx-pagelist/). Since we’re talking about standards, I think this is worth addressing. Page numbers are not meaningless — they have a definite use in citing references, which is important for any type of scholarly work.

posted at 03:54 pm on March 9, 2010 by jmaloney

8 Page numbers

For what could be called pure electronic books, even if there is also a printed book, page numbers indeed don’t make any sense. An index or table of contents has to use hyperlinks, not page numbers. (And don’t think an index isn’t useful. I assure you that a search function is not one-tenth as useful.)

However, for alternate formats that are meant to be a conceptual duplicate of a printed book, you do need to encode page numbers somehow. The standard example is books for the blind. Large print never does this, but Braille books can print the original page number and the Braille page number on each sheet; analogue talking books play a tone when the reader turns a page (this is outdated, obviously); DAISY electronic talking books can notate original printed page in various ways, though it’s been a while since I read that spec.

I grant this causes complications when you want to write a bibliographic citation for a “book” when all you have is the E version and your readers are almost certainly going to be looking at the P version.

posted at 04:37 pm on March 9, 2010 by Joe Clark

9 So-called complex layouts

Livio, you are articulating a well-accepted position, but there are flaws in your foundation.

A printed page made for a reader with no relevant disabilities is a random-access medium. You can look anywhere you want and read anything you want in any order, or just put the book on the floor and admire a double-page spread.

Electronically, the issue becomes reading order (“logical” reading order in the terminology). Do the contents, when read start to finish, make sense? If you jump in at a certain point and read from there to the finish, does it make sense?

In InDesign, proper threading order of text frames results in (e.g.) a tagged PDF with a logical reading order. It is true that the designer must make a decision as to when the reader is to experience a callout or a sidebar. My experience is this is only occasionally a real cause for debate.

The same applies to actual E-books. You need a logical reading order. ePub allows CSS placement of callouts and sidebars, which could instead (or in addition) be separate files.

Not every aspect of print graphic design can be duplicated in electronic document design, which relies fundamentally on structure, not inferences drawn from appearance.

posted at 04:43 pm on March 9, 2010 by Joe Clark

10 "I need more space"

To so sure that an “author” should be making the decisions on which type of space character should be used in a given context. Seems like that should be handled by the rules engine that proofs the manuscript for well-formedness.

mxt

THINK
think different
Think Open Source

“I need more space” – Creature Comforts

posted at 06:18 pm on March 9, 2010 by mxtbcca