Disqus - Latest Comments for baldur

Re: Graceful eBook Degradation

Baldur — Thu, 23 Aug 2012 08:43:51 -0000

The problem is that most publishers have no economic incentive to go beyond simple print-to-e conversions. Ebooks are, for most publishers, replacing mass market paperbacks as just another rung in the print format hierarchy. They aren't going to be doing any work that is only accessible in digital, especially since digital is replacing a low-priced budget format.

My point is that print was never just one format but many, with differing capabilities and requirements. Publishers are set up to handle certain kinds of format variations but not others and, within that setup, budget formats don't get added features or new design elements. And ebooks are very much a budget format for most of them.

Given those incentives, I fully expect all big publisher experimentation in ebook-specific features to cease once the initial ebook gold rush wears off. The only parts of most publishers that are likely retain a budget and an interest in experimentation in digital are the marketing departments.Of course that leaves mid-sized and niche-specific publishers but that's unlikely to be a big enough market for the major toolmakers or platform-owners to care about.I am a pessimist, though, so there's that.

Another problem is that most print-to-e conversions don't even come close to retaining the design meaning of the print original (and I'm saying this as a fan of digital). EPUB reading systems, even the most advanced like iBooks, don't come close to supporting the CSS necessary to properly reproduce the design of anything beyond the most basic.

Picking two books at random off my desk in front of me, Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way and Soetsu Yanagi's The Unknown Craftsman, and neither of them could be done in EPUB without severe compromises.

The next book below them in the stack is Jesse James Garret's The Elements of User Experience and it too could not be done in EPUB (or KF8) without sacrificing most of the design that makes the book what it is.And they couldn't be done as a fixed-layout epub because they all feature long tracts of text mixed in with designed elements. The only non-fiction books on my desk that could be done as ebooks are Juhani Pallasmaa's The Eyes of the Skin and Junichiro Tanizaki's in praise of shadows. All of the rest would be badly compromised by the 'adaptation'.

These are also books that publishers would never have dared release as mangled mass-market paperbacks, yet today they release all of them in a format with design capabilities that are similarly limited. Only God knows why they think that's acceptable.

If publishers, toolmakers, and platform vendors can't handle print-to-e conversions properly, why should we expect them to be able to tackle ebook-specific problems and solve them?iBooks Author and .ibooks are pretty much the only tool-format combo that can handle the design needs of non-fiction. Which is tragic since that part of the iBooks platform is completely proprietary and only works on a single class of devices (iPads).

Anyway…

The publishing industry's adoption of ebooks is entirely economic and for the most part ebooks seem to be treated by them as a replacement for cheap mass market paperbacks. It's hard to see in that situation any incentive for publishers (or platform vendors) to do anything interesting or innovative with the format.

Re: Do Not Track and “Don’t be evil”

Baldur — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 17:48:16 -0000

Do-not-track is pretty much going to be EU regulation. It's either that or opt-in cookies. Google will have to choose between the two, IMO.

Re: Now You Can Make an eBook for the iPad on the iPad - eBookNewser

Baldur — Tue, 31 May 2011 16:26:18 -0000

The version of Pages for iOS released today doesn't support epub export. Not unless it's hidden away somewhere, I can only find export options for the Pages, PDF and Word formats. Pages on iOS has never supported epub export in the past.

Re: Notes on piracy

Baldur — Tue, 10 May 2011 07:03:08 -0000

The first point is true, but as I said in point 15, some products (both content and software) just aren't viable at a lower price point, even if piracy is non-existent. A book that takes a lot of research and time to produce but has a niche market isn't viable at a low price and could easily be killed off by piracy at a higher price, because of exactly the attitude you're describing. The publisher would inevitably be accused of greed, even if the book just wouldn't be viable at a lower price.

Second point is partially true, except for the fact that the way musical piracy works is a lot more complex than that. What little research I've seen (all sketchy and vague, admittedly) show that musical pirates are quite a bit more selective about what they pay for than the non-pirating consumers. They also tend to spend more money than non-pirates.

The effect of a strong ebook piracy culture (again, piracy can't function without a strong pirating community) is unknown. We don't know if it furthers sales of print versions of books pirates like, whether they use it to sample books and only pay for the ones they like (as is common in TV pirating). We just don't know, and if publishers solve all of the availability and price problems, today, we need never know.

The third point is absolutely true and it ties in with what I said about the only real solution to piracy is to make people want to pay, because you sure as hell can't make them pay if they don't want to.

Re: Malware, the Mac, and the wolf

Baldur — Fri, 06 May 2011 13:57:24 -0000

There needs to be a lot of education among mac users about basic security issues (Rule no. 1: Don't Use Safari, it's consistently the most vulnerable browser in all hackfests and research). The way most of the pundits talk (both the pro-mac crowd, like Gruber, or the anti-mac crowd) undermines any such effort. The anti-mac people do little more than shill for bloated antivirus packages and the pro-mac crowd poopoos the entire issue.

So, we're stuck.

Re: ePub is the new Betamax

Baldur — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 07:46:40 -0000

Track stats, sure. Share elements, absolutely (but don't limit them to facebook). But the badges and awards are annoying as hell. I can't do anything in the bloody app without racking up those damn red numbers in the Reading Life tab. It annoys me so much that I can't really use the Kobo app.

Gameification is toxic as it undermines intrinsic motivation by adding extrinsic motivation (win awards/badges). Games as an interactivity structure is useful in a highly involved, skill-based, context (Photoshop, Office or Illustrator, for example, would be prime candidates) but it seriously gets in the way of reading. Adding gameification to reading systems, news sites/apps, feed aggregators, etc. is a really, really, bad idea. Adding social elements (sharing, tweeting, quoting, linking) OTOH is a really, really, good idea, reading has always been a more social activity than people realise. Conflating the two, like Kobo, is doing is a mistake.

IMHO, as always :-)

Re: Open versus Closed

Baldur — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 07:34:57 -0000

Yeah, and B&N just can't afford any slipups or mistakes at this point. If the tablet market manages to continue to grow and diversify beyond just iPads, then it might make sense for all of the runner up players in the ebook market to abandon their hardware strategies. With a fast growing tablet market there is a considerable opportunity cost to any hardware play.

Re: Amazon’s Ad-supported Kindle Price: Too High?

Baldur — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 09:10:36 -0000

There's also a chance that this will increase the sales of the now mid-range Wifi Kindle. A very slightly cheaper device with a clear and understandable drawback makes upsells easier.

Re: Amazon’s Ad-supported Kindle Price: Too High?

Baldur — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 09:09:11 -0000

Ads aren't annoying, really, but auctioning off a part of a device you've paid for to advertisers certainly is. You see 'annoyance' and assume I'm referring to the ads. What I mean is that the deal, the loss of control, the package as presented, comes with considerable annoyances for the reader. For example, making the screensaver customisable is one of the most requested features among avid Kindle users.

I do disagree with you about ads in general (there is a huge difference between a search ad that ties in with intent and the rest), but that is irrelevant in this case. This is going to look to readers more like the tactics used by Microsoft to cripple Windows 7 for netbooks than a subsidy.

IMHO, as usual :-D

Re: Amazon’s Ad-supported Kindle Price: Too High?

Baldur — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 05:40:33 -0000

What you say is absolutely true, but what TUAW says is also true—from the buyer's perspective. The problem here is that there is a huge disparity in the value of the ad from the advertiser's perspective and the annoyance of the reader's part. A device where a part of it has been permanently auctioned off to ad cos is a hard enough a sell even if it were cheaper.

Re: My Kindle 3 Arrived This Morning

Baldur — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 06:35:44 -0000

Oh, yeah. The screeniness (glare, brightness, the feeling that you're staring into a flashlight) definitely does detract from reading on the iPad. Doesn't make it unusable for me (probably to the detriment of my eyesight) but it does shorten the length of the reading periods. I still prefer it, personally, to the 505 because the 505 has too little contrast, although I have read a few books on the 505.

In terms of readability the Kindle is definitely better than either the iPad or the 505 by a considerable margin. I haven't had a chance to try any technical books on it, it seems to render PDFs fine, but the screen is too small for it. It's probably fine for those few cases where, like with O'Reilly, the publisher has a ebook edition that's aware of the limitations of the .mobi format (think: Web circa 1995).

*10 minutes later*

I just compared my copy of Crockford's "Javascript: The Good Parts" with the Kindle sample of the same book and it translates quite well. The sample of Resig's "Pro Javascript Techniques" was less nice, looks like they're using the Topaz format rather than the .mobi .

So to answer your question, the small screen e-ink devices aren't that good for technical books unless you manage to find non-pdf versions.

Re: Pages to epub

Baldur — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 05:40:52 -0000

You can often just unzip an epub file, edit the files and then zip it up again (although there is some slight trickery to making sure the mimetype file is first in the archive.

The problem with everything being divs in the xhtml files is that it's difficult to automatically know which bits to search-and-replace, should be a doddle with simple files but, then again, those are the same files that are a doddle to convert into epub anyway, so that's not much help.

The situation is becoming remarkably similar to the bad old days of the browser wars where sites were either optimised for IE *or* Netscape, rarely both. Not a good development and I hope the various platform developers turn away from this path before it's too late.

Re: Pages to epub

Baldur — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 17:04:33 -0000

You know, I was critical of a few of the decisions made in the design of zhook a while back but seeing the mess everybody else is making of generating epub files does put it in a new light. It's an absolute godsend in comparison.

Zhook is probably one of the few sane web developer oriented ebook proposals out there.

Re: Pages to epub

Baldur — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 10:07:31 -0000

I'm grumpy, sure (have always been), but as for the rest I think you've got me confused with someone else :-D

Re: The printed book’s path to oblivion

Baldur — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 13:26:10 -0000

That's one of my points (prediction). How about the other one?: Ebooks are held back by politics and economics, not technology.

Speculating on the future impact on publishing of improved tech is meaningless as long as we don't know how the restructuring of the publishing industry is going to play out. The economic and social structure of the industry trumps whatever technological capabilities future developments might present.

The publishing industry won't ever be capable of leveraging fantastic screen technology, for example, if it locks itself in on tech that's more than ten years behind the curve (mobi & epub).

It's not that people shouldn't do long term predictions about the future, just that they should realise that they're not predictions, they're plausible fictions. They can OTOH be valuable as "if … then" thought exercises just as long as everybody realises that they leave out all of the unknown and unknowable events that will actually take place in the as history plays out.

I'd prefer long term thinking from the perspective of risk instead. (e.g. "What are the risks, long-term, if we do X?"). But, then again, I have been accused of being a pessimist.

And by the by, you do a lot less long-range future thinking on this blog than you seem to believe. Most of your posts are current event and near term (1-5 years) analyses that are informed by a very (very!) thorough knowledge of publishing history, which I enjoy a lot. I don't think you've done a "let's make stuff up about the long term future" kind of post since sometime in the spring, I think. At least, that's if my memory isn't failing me.

Anyway, I made my point and it was acknowledged even if disagreed with. Can't ask for much than that so I'll let you guys carry on.

Re: The printed book’s path to oblivion

Baldur — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 05:59:29 -0000

Now I'm a 100% hardcore, booyah, ebook cheerleader and have been for many years now (so much so that I dedicated my academic career to researching ebooks and interactivity before leaving for the real world after my PhD).

So most would expect me to agree with you or Negroponte.

But I don't. At last not with all of your points.

Any prediction beyond, maybe, a year is risky. Especially when it comes to something as global and distributed as technological development.

To wit, ongoing technological progress is an article of faith not fact. given a thirty year timetable you have too many variables that can't be predicted or accounted for. Peak oil. Other recessions or even depressions. Political upheavals.

It has to be said that in face of crisis or even temporary collapse, the printed book is *more*, not less, resilient. A week long power outage would render ebooks temporarily extinct. Iceland, my home country, is connected to the outside internet via a single fiberoptic cable which can, and does, disconnect for no apparent reason. Infrastructure disruption of this kind can be caused by anything from deterioration due to further financial down-cycles, war, embargoes, sabotage, resource depletion. Ebooks are built on a complex, globalised infrastructure and supply chain and this makes them more fragile, not less.

Also most of the progress needed in ereading isn't technological but political in nature. Ebook layouts, design and the capabilities of ereaders are today roughly where the web was ten years ago. There's no technological reason why it should be so, other than the fact that many of the principals in the industry decided that ebook's should not match the web in capabilities (epub standard is full of arbitrary differences from the web as a platform).

Even if you do believe that technological progress will continue unabated there's nothing inevitable in social or political progress and as I said, most of the issues that are holding epub back in terms of graphics, design and rendering are social and political in nature.

All of this isn't to say that ebooks aren't the future of publishing or that they won't be the dominant form of publishing in a few short years.

What I'm saying is that we don't know what happens after that, that it's dangerous to assume that history goes along a constant forward vector, and that we can't rule out the possibility that the era of ebooks might only last a few decades before economic and environmental circumstances return people to print.

I don't know. You don't know. And Negroponte has an atrocious track record when it comes to predictions. People should refrain from making long-term predictions because the course of a single industry can be affected by so many outside factors that are invisible and unknowable by any single person (or group of people).

Anyway, my two pence.

Re: Are We Missing Anyone?

Baldur — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 05:46:31 -0000

Actually, knowing the way the French police behave towards protesters this law *will* be used against non-muslims. And any countries that passes similar legislation will also turn it into a general purpose security directive. This is the standard MO of Western countries post-11 September, pass laws with a specific media spin which then get used generally.

One example off the top of my head (because I'm Icelandic). When the UK applied terrorism laws against Iceland (and it was the whole country, later limited to just one bank).

No matter what the rhetoric surrounding it is, what the French have on the books now is a general purpose, religion-neutral, gender-neutral ban on covering your face that will be enforced at the discretion of the police.

That's without going into all of the issues with the rhetoric surrounding the law, with the misogyny, racism, etc. etc.

Re: How Do You Say Congrats in Icelandic?

Baldur — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 10:22:11 -0000

Hamingjuóskir is exactly the right word. :-D Was also pleased to see the Bishop of the state church write a long apology for some homophobic remarks he made a few years back.

Re: BSAG » Grave of the Fireflies

Baldur — Wed, 19 May 2010 18:32:31 -0000

I can hardly think about that movie without getting a lump in my throat. I don't think I could survive watching it again.

Re: Scribd’s HTML5 is a mess

Baldur — Sun, 16 May 2010 17:45:48 -0000

That thought's been criss-crossing my mind. I set disqus comments up initially out of curiosity but it's obviously at this point more of a pest than a feature.

As to why I respond, I have a confession to make. I find responding to insipid rudeness with level-headed politeness to be rather funny. Besides, the drive-by commenters are unlikely to ever see my responses but my replies are a chance to make a short, vacuous and, in all honesty, largely common sensical post a little bit more useful to a future reader.

But, yeah. The comments are going to be removed in the near future, definitely before I next open my mouth about the embodiment of the Peter Principle that is HTML5.

Re: Scribd’s HTML5 is a mess

Baldur — Sat, 15 May 2010 19:07:37 -0000

Anything specific that makes it painful (rendering, anti-aliasing, design of the typeface, line-height)? If it's the typography or typeface, then that's something I can investigate. On the other hand, I'm afraid there isn't much I can do if the text rendering in your browser turns all serifed fonts into mud.

Re: Scribd’s HTML5 is a mess

Baldur — Sat, 15 May 2010 16:16:05 -0000

Looks like this is a CSS rendering bug on the Windows and Linux versions of Chrome but not Mac, and only when an inset box-shadow is used with border-radius. You're probably seeing this bug: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail...

Useful to know. Just reiterates the classic lesson that the same browser can vary from platform to platform. Thanks for the pointer :-)

Re: Scribd’s HTML5 is a mess

Baldur — Sat, 15 May 2010 15:59:54 -0000

There's a difference between scattering all of the CSS into the various elements' style attributes and having it all in one place.

Which version of Chrome are you using? The rounded corners work fine in 5.0.375.38 beta and all of the earlier versions I've tried. If simple -webkit-border-radius is broken in some version of Chrome then that's useful knowledge to have.

But even if I were writing on a crap, ancient blogger website, laid out in tables and using HTML 3.2 in its full FONT tag glory, that still doesn't make anything I say any less valid. There's a difference in context with a personal website designed to be a playful sandbox on the one hand and a VC supported startup product that has featured strongly in online discussions on web standards on the other. Nobody is mentioning my website as a poster-child for an embryonic web standard nor should they, it is irrelevant to the argument, pro or con.

Re: Scribd’s HTML5 is a mess

Baldur — Sat, 15 May 2010 14:21:11 -0000

Well, the python gfx module (which I assume is the part they were using) is actually an excellent piece of software, not just for outputting a PDF to swf but also for rendering a PDF as a series of images. I'd have been surprised if they weren't using it.

My main points (in case they weren't clear above) are that Scribd's HTML5 reader isn't HTML5 by any rational measure (using a spec originating somewhere in the W3 HTML5 effort or WhatWG), and that the markup it generates is messy, inevitable considering that it's content originates as PDFs.

I haven't even touched on the larger, more important, problems with Scribd, namely its 'social' design, because that's a separate, much longer, debate.

Re: Scribd’s HTML5 is a mess

Baldur — Sat, 15 May 2010 14:01:01 -0000

@Jey Gmail, with its offline storage (a spec originating from the HTML5 effort), definitely is HTML5 and has more of a claim to the tag than Scribd does, which is built on absolute positioning and @font-face, neither of which are a part of HTML5.

Facebook connect uses the postMessage API (from the HTML5 effort) and the Facebook website uses the HTML5 video element on the iPad and iPhones. Both use more of the HTML5 spec than Scribd 'HTML5'.