It's just such a poorly executed standard. Here's just a few of the things that drive me crazy.
Too Many Font Sizes
Depending on the format you will be presented with a range of choices for font size. Why? How much difference does it make if the book is displayed in 10 point as opposed to 12 point type? We need three sizes - small, medium, and big. Having eight or more choices is unnecessary complexity. Having so many different possibilities just makes the pagination that much more unpredictable. Speaking of which...
Unpredictable Pagination
The thing that jumps out at me more than any other about the poor quality of eBooks is the way things that ought to be consistent will, instead, move around the screen. A sense of place in the book can be important, but when the length of the book is arbitrary that sense is destroyed.
Where it becomes downright diabolical is footnotes. When I follow a footnote in a Kindle eBook by touching on the asterisk, I'm taken to another page where the footnote resides. OK - makes sense. But then when I follow the link back to where I was, it doesn't present the page to me as I left it. Instead it tries to put the link at the top left of the screen. Sometimes it manages to do it, sometimes it doesn't, but why does it try at all? Why am I not presented with the page in the same state as I left it? When the position of the footnote returns to the top left I'm sometimes left without the preceding text, which sets up the context for the footnote.
The simple act of flipping the book between landscape and portrait will cause the whole book to change. If I want to refer to a previously read section it can be hell's own task to find it again.
Here's another example. These three pages are what you see if you start at page 19-20, go back to page 17-18, and the forward to 19-20 again. Notice how the text at the top left of page 19 moves backwards to page 18 and shifts to the middle of the right side of the screen, and then stays there and disappears off of page 19 when you go forward again.
And the worst... the thing that kept me away from publishing as an eBook... the thing that has been the biggest disappointment to me since I did... is captioning.
Cap
(This is a joke. You'll understand in a minute.)
tioning
It seems such a small request that any caption should remain tied to the photo or illustration it refers to. And yet this seems impossible. In my own book I have instances where there is a caption and then a photograph, but the caption refers to the photo on the previous page. And the photo on the next page appears with a caption, but it's the one for the photo on the left. The proper caption is on the next page.
Low Quality, Poor Formatting for Photos
The other simple (or so I thought) demand I had for my eBook was that the photos take up the width of the page, and that, if possible, the reader could zoom in and see them full screen. Instead, photos are often small and of poor quality. Double tapping on the photo enlarges it slightly, but thereby reduces the quality.
Seriously folks, this is all really basic stuff. The eBook standards should never have been released into the wild at this stage.
I took apart an eBook to see what was inside it and found what is essentially a subset of the HTML 1.0 standard. Some of you may not have been alive at the time, but HTML 1.0 was, to put it mildly, crude. It was an experiment more than anything else. I am at a loss to understand why the eBook format is such a gigantic step backwards in the display of text and images.
Bring Back The Book Designers
For centuries book designers have trod the fine line between aesthetics and usability, and created some of the finest examples of our intelligence, creativity, and sophistication as communicating beings. I hope the eBook standards people will lock the engineers out of the room and allow book designers to drive the advances in eBook formatting.
Book designers look at the content of the book and decide how to shape that content so that the experience of reading is supporting the content - sometimes even adding extra dimension to the content. The eBook formats simply blend it into a smooth slurry and cram it down a cheap pipe.
It actually kind of shocks me that Steve Jobs got on board with this standard and didn't push for something better - or simply do an end run around the standard and create something better. Perhaps that's what the iBooks Authoring tool is. I hope to give it a shake down shortly and will report on my findings.
eBooks are okay for reading simple, text-driven narratives. Not great, just okay. For anything with even the slightest sophistication or graphic content they are sorely lacking. Consumers are notoriously poor at demanding better design from technology companies, so I hope someone on the other side of the fence will wake up and realise that we need - and deserve - better.
