Part of my bookshelf
Well, I just finished up an internship at a great little Portland publishing company called Ink & Paper. While I was there, I worked primarily with Three Muses Press, one of their imprints, but I also had the opportunity to contribute a couple of articles to the Ink & Paper blog. As the focus of my internship was most on the tech side of publishing, the blog articles that I wrote were about new technology and publishing. In particular, I got to summarize a bunch of the research I had been doing into ebooks, and particularly ebook design.
Everyone at Ink & Paper is awesome, so it should come as no surprise that they have no problems with me posting the articles here as well as on their blog (though the second part of the design article will have to wait until they’ve published it on their blog). So, without further ado, here are some of my thoughts on designing ebooks. Check ‘em out after the break.
At first glance, ebooks may seem just one short step removed from the electronic files used in publishing. After all, once the book has gone through editing and design, it is usually in a .pdf or InDesign format—why not just package that up and put it on the internet as an ebook?
The answer to that question is that ebooks require a different design paradigm than standard printed work, because with ebooks, we can never quite be sure how the book we have published is being read. Assuming they are reading the same book, a commuter on the train on the way home from work, a child reading by flashlight under the covers after bed time, and a student relaxing with a book in a coffee shop all are using the same artifact. The book they read is perhaps 5 ½” by 8 ½”, with black text on white or off-white paper, with a fixed number of lines per page. Page 44 for the student will be page 44 for the commuter and page 44 for the child.
Ebooks, however, are completely different, in that one person may download an ebook to read on his Sony Reader, while another may view the same book on her iPhone, and still a third person may be using his desktop computer’s 22-inch monitor. These devices have quite different screen resolutions, screen sizes, and overall appearances, which means that the notion of fixed book design needs to go out the window for ebooks; otherwise, you run the very real risk of creating ebook content that is not viewable on some devices. A .pdf file of an 8 ½” by 11” document, for example, would be larger than the Sony Reader’s screen, and far larger than the iPhone’s screen.
In order to deal with this issue, ebooks must either be designed individually for each specific ebook reading platform (a project so massive in scope that it would not be surprising to learn that it was never-ending, as more platforms are added faster than old ones can be designed for), or they must be flexible enough to fit any platform. Reflowability of text is one of the most crucial elements to ensure this flexibility. In essence, text must be able to flow by itself, much as text on web pages will shuffle itself about in order to fit on the page as width changes. This of course has many consequences for editors, as with reflowability it becomes meaningless to ensure that there are no widows, orphans, ladders, or other such typographical eyesores in a given manuscript.
Fonts are another important area to consider; it’s impossible to know which fonts a reader will have on their device, beyond a certain few basic fonts common to nearly all systems. Font families (serif, sans serif) rather than individual fonts should be specified for ebooks, and margins, padding, and other spacing should be proportional (4.5em margins, rather than one inch margins). This helps to ensure that the page will scale well and be presented well on a screen of any size. In many ways, the design of ebooks is similar to the design of web sites.
Publishing ebooks, then, requires a shift in how we think about design. The format of a book is no longer static and unchanging; rather, like the publishing industry itself, it must be flexible and adaptable. Next time, we’ll look into the specifics of what sorts of ebook formats are common in the market, and the nuts and bolts of formatting for them. Until then, enjoy the flexibility of a new way of looking at book design!
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