I got up at an ungodly hour last Saturday to make it in time for the 9am start of BookCamp Toronto, and I wasn’t disappointed. An intense day of discussions, arguments and debates — all in the name of books — meant that by the time I was sitting at my gate on the last flight home to Montreal, my brain was total tofu.
My day that began in the “Death to DRM” session moderated by Sean Cranbury kicked off the debate about “how do we make money if we didn’t lock down digital books”, a topic that continued well into Peter Brantley’s session on “When every book is connected to everyone”. It was in Evan Leibovitch’s session titled “Kindle Shmindle: future directions for E-Books” where that it became obvious that there’s a definite lack in knowledge about how we should handle the technical transition from paper-book format to digital-book format. I don’t mean how the industry needs to change — that’s a much bigger/scarier issue. I mean, quite simply understanding what an ebook can look like today.
For someone who’s been creating web pages since the days of NCSA Mosaic, it makes my hair stand on end to think that we’re repeating the same arguments of print vs web. But digital is ugly. Eew, why would a reader be able to choose to mangle my design? Why would I want to let a reader ruin my beautiful optimal reading line-length?
In the session I co-moderated with Carlos Scolari on “The Evolving Ecology of Books”, visual book design was a recurring topic. Carlos began by introducing the evolution of the book, therefore how we interface with the book, and I challenged the participants to question why books were traditionally portrait but not landscape, and how it’s influenced even the design of e-readers today. From then on, the conversation snowballed; we spent a good deal of time discussing the relationship of content to its container in terms of design, and what this means if you’re a content creator or a book designer. You’ll find photos of the live mind-map that I did here, here and here. At the end of our session, Liza Daly kindly took a little time to demo the ePub Zen Garden project, a site modelled after CSS Zen Garden, “to dispel the myth that digital books can’t also be crafted works of visual design”.
It is humbling to realise that to evolve with the medium still takes a tectonic shift in philosophy. What differs between now and almost 10 years ago is that browsers have gotten a ton better with CSS support. Webfonts is not dead. Typekit is around the corner, and we will soon see where that takes us. All the outcry about how typography sucks, how there’s a lack of control over layouts — for the most part, we are getting close to solving the hairiest of these even if our solutions don’t replicate what we’ve done for hundreds of years. There are bucketfuls of resources out there on web typography and layout. Let me put this more succinctly: we have the technology to make digital design beautiful. We are just in the process of evolving, and part of evolving means letting go.
So, a question remains. Webkit is open-source. So is Gecko. ePub content is XML, XHTML/CSS. So why do so few e-readers re-use these rendering technologies that are freely available, instead of reinventing the wheel?
I’m sure BookCamp attendees left with many questions and many more ideas about the future of the book, as well as what will become of publishers, readers, writers alike. While many of my discussions with folks were positive, I came away wondering if we weren’t about to see history repeat itself with e-reader wars — much like the old browser wars, format and standardization wars, and fundamentally, the necessary culture shift in design that would see us learn to adapt to new ways of reading — therefore, potentially, new ways of writing and thinking.
10 Comments
great article steph, and thanks for all those juicy links…
hope the tofu brain returns to some better meat – thank U 4 live mind map & reflexion about portrait/landscape formats – do your “writers alike” means that none of them assisted ?
@hugh, @F Bon, you’re welcome. :)
@F Bon – there were a couple of writers in the sessions I participated in, but sadly, I felt we didn’t hear enough of their voices. There was a writer in the session following mine on sBook: where a writer said if the book format changed to something else than the book we have today, she would want to write for this new format. I find that very encouraging.
Great post. Interesting to ponder how these hangups will be dealt with when we really break through into the next generation of books, with layered storytelling, reader participation etc, of the sort Peter Brantley raised in his session.
Bravo. I was quite surprised the first time I cracked open an ePub and realized I knew everything that was in there. Turns out, we just need the reader technology to catch up.
My understanding (after asking this very directly to implementers) is that using Webkit makes it tremendously harder to:
override default rendering (wrapping poetry or code, say, inside a tiny viewport)
allow users to customize 1000 tiny things about the typography of their ebooks (hint: I hate this)
add notes, annotations, and bookmarks
I only recently learned this, so I haven’t been able to do my own investigations to understand how much of these are concrete limitations rather than just not-trivial-to-dos.
It was fascinating to watch the way in which the landscape Twitter Book challenged all sorts of assumptions inside O’Reilly (also, to a lesser extent, the squarish slide:ology).
Hi Keith, thanks for your comment! I would be really interested in finding out in more detail why it’s difficult (in terms of e-reader implementation) to override default rendering — considering separating style from content/markup using CSS is precisely what allows users to create their own styles. That said, I’m speaking from knowledge as a (former) interface developer and how rendering engines behave when you feed it the right things, and not someone who’s had to dig deep into the guts of something like WebKit :)
According to Henry Petroski’s “The Book on the Bookshelf”, the book as we know it is portrait because from an engineering standpoint, it is stronger to bind the book on its longer edge. It’s fascinating that something as simple as that has influenced how we perceive the form and format of the book for centuries, and how it’s influenced design of things like the Kindle, or Sony Reader – in a world whereby we need no longer be tied to a portrait format. That said, art and photography books have traditionally been more experimental, and have been produced with different sizes and book formats.
Apart from webkit based rendering I’m thinking that it would make a lot of sense to look at ODF. The OpenDocument Format is meant for having rich content and its generated / rendered by applications like KOffice on just about any platform already.
html/css is much more limited (tabs not allowed!) for professional text layout, this is where ODF shines. Things like reflowing text is also possible if the odf reader chooses to ignore the page settings (or only use them as a hint ;)
ps. why are your blog entries not showing up on identi.ca anymore?
thank for the The WebKit link, Eric, From France
Niksralk say: I apologise, but it not absolutely approaches me. Perhaps there are still variants?
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