I wish it had gone differently. I don’t fault Readmill for selling at this point. They did excellent work.
I’ve previously gone on record about my enthusiasm for their platform. (Which reminds me, I need to do a followup to that post, Kindle for iOS has improved dramatically.) Unlike most other firms designing ebook readers, Readmill understood that all of the typographic variables are interconnected. Unlike others, their defaults were beautiful to read.
Driven by curiosity (as always), I’ve just spend a large part of my lunch break browsing through various forums[1], trying to get a handle on what problems self-publishers are facing when they are creating their ebooks.
My impression is that, unlike what I expected from the work and challenges I face making ebooks for a traditional publisher, styling and formatting isn’t a major issue—formatting problems seem limited to edge cases. I’m assuming this is because most self-publishers are doing novels with very simple style needs.
The problems people seem to be facing, in no particular order:
Once upon a time there was a man from Iceland who attended a conference in Canada.
The weather was, by any sane measure, awful. The temperature was borderline arctic. Snow covered everything.
But it reminded him of home.
The publishing industry has an absolute mess of unanswered questions that need further investigation if we are to solve its problems.
Here are a few relevant problem statements, off the top of my head. I’d be very surprised if these questions aren’t answerable with a bit of work.
Yesterday’s blog post is the last in the pile of previously unpublished posts that I intend to publish.
There’s more left in the pile, about ten last I checked, but I’m not going to be publishing them.
It’s very easy to make a decent-looking ebook in iBooks Author, then drop in a bunch of expensive and badly thought out interactive doohickeys and call it a day.
This is a mistake. A regular book ‘decorated’ with interactive tumours growing throughout its body is not an improvement over even a regular ebook.
Word has for many years now been the publishing industry’s de facto editorial and production format. Once you move into the world of digital, Word ceases to become a foundation and instead becomes a pair of cement shoes dragging you underwater. It is the worst possible format for the purpose.
Screen design isn’t print design and will never be print design, no matter how high the screen’s resolution gets.
Digital design needs to account for a level of changeability and dynamism that print has never had to deal with. The interaction model of print is embodied in the book object and not in the on-page design. The interaction model of digital has to be accounted for in the screen design itself and functionality needs to be specifically designed.
Reminder to aggrieved authors: Nobody holds a gun to your head and forces you to sign a contract.
— Don Linn (@DonLinn) February 12, 2014
Normally, whenever Don tweets anything I just nod my head in agreement and move on.
My response to this tweet, however, was more ambivalent because it seems to imply that we shouldn’t be complaining about unfair standard practices in the publishing industry.
Everybody who knows what I do assumes that I’ve given up on print books.
—You make ebooks? Haha, you don’t need any bookcases then, do you? Must be nice.
Not that I haven’t used it as an excuse once in a while. As a rejection, it’s a little bit nicer than telling somebody that I don’t want their book because it isn’t good enough to put on my shelf—oh, and the cover’s ugly to boot.
Studio Tendra 