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Do you have news you would like to publish? If so enter it using our news form. eBook: structure and surface in a sublime marriage or all mouth and no trousers?Thursday’s eBook forum brought together the developers of this small and surprisingly usable technology with typographic designers and font developers. The things the three groups thought were interesting didn’t seem to overlap very much, as you might expect. Adobe: Acrobat does somersaults Adobe’s idea of an eBook is an Acrobat file processed through the company’s ContentServer and read through the company’s eBook reader. The content server adds stuff that lets the provider charge for the eBook and impose some very flexible licensing conditions using a digital rights management (DRM) system which conforms to the Open eBook consortium standards. Adobe seems to use its own internal format for the eBook rather than the XML structure defined by the Open eBook consortium. (If you’re getting lost at this point, it’s probably because I am too.) To get even more complicated, you can optionally add XML content to the eBook, presumably valid to the XML DTD. Adobe’s eBook reader uses CoolType (I don’t know - ask someone else. This is ATypI and full of font designers) to make nice type on small screens. As far as I can tell you can’t read an Adobe eBook on a Microsoft eBook reader. This raises the question: what is an eBook? I have some ideas about this, in a minute. Adobe UK’s Mike Clarke pitched Acrobat eBooks mainly on their ease of creation. We all use Acrobat as part of our workflow, and anything that goes to print can be converted to PDF in a few moments. This means an Acrobat eBook is the work of a few moments too and this in turn makes it attractive for publishers who are looking to ‘repurpose’ existing content at low cost and low risk. Microsoft: first. Best? Microsoft’s version of eBook is text file, which conforms to the Open eBook consortium standards. This means it’s written in XML, which is a Good Thing, in principle. It also uses a digital rights management system, though not the standard agreed by the Open eBook consortium. Which makes it a kind of mirror of Adobe’s eBook standards support. Mike Duggan from Microsoft, who presented, is a font man, so he wanted to tell us all about the rendering and Microsoft ClearType (ClearType, CoolType, OpenType, TrueType: got all that? It’s important you understand this stuff). You can’t tell anything from video-projected demonstrations, but the Microsoft version of eBook is actually quite impressive. You can read the text and the navigation is unobstrusive and effective. Quite an achievement, aided by a couple of fonts - Berlingua Antique and Frutiger Linotype - crafted carefully to work well on low-resolution LCD screens. The new version of Microsoft’s eBook reader, published next month, has some improvements and a ‘riffle control’. I have no idea what this means but it sounds good. You can make Microsoft eBooks from Word or from specialist tools. Adobe wins here, as you can take any PDF and turn it into an Adobe eBook, as commercial publishers don’t have final copy in Word. On the other hand Microsoft’s reader software is in two million pocket PCs and accounts for over 1.5 million downloads of the version intended for laptops and desktop PCs. Which does raise the question: what is an eBook? If you can’t read one eBook on the ‘wrong’ eBook reader, how come both things can be called eBooks? What they have in common is the desire to make money from ‘content’. Everyone wants to make money from content now - particularly that the venture capital has dried up. Last and least? The last bit of technology in this race for the high ground is in the ‘plucky underdog’ category. The t.BOOOK (sic) is a combination of hardware and business model from UK company Davtel. A little single-purpose electronic book that aims to sell at the GameBoy price-point, this little box has a 640x480 screen. The idea is that publishers download content in some (unknown) format to High Street bookshops. You go into the bookshop with your t.BOOOK and upload a book into it through an IR link. The device uses the FreeType open-source TrueType renderer which makes, as far as we could see from the demo pictures, a fairly poor job of making bitmaps on the screen. Evaluating the eBook(s): designers speak out John Berry, distinguished U&LC emeritus editor, and Paul Luna, a professor at Reading University’s Typography & Graphic Communication department and past Oxford University press design boss, had some bad news for the technologists. From slightly different perspectives, John and Paul delivered to same message: the different eBook implementations have a way to go before they meet the needs of real readers. John Berry approaches the eBook with the needs of the reader and the experience of the book designer at front and centre. He finds eBook deficient in some delivering the differentiation in space and contrast that articulate text in book publishing, and criticised the lack of control available to the designer (talking mostly about the Microsoft version). John sees the eBook as, potentially, a great delivery system for the kind of small-press work that he does a lot of, but says that it isn’t up to the job because of this kind of failing. He was particularly scathing about eBook’s default setting of justified lines with no or very limited hyphenation, which obviously undermines the work done on making legible fonts in a in a crude display system. John spent some time discussing the extra demands placed on a text layout engine on a small device which imposes very narrow measures on the designers. He made the point that in an environment where the reader can control size, typeface etc, the designer still needs control, but that it is a different kind ofg control. The designer needs to be able to specify, not the details of the display, but the rules which govern the display in any text reflow. This requires both controls for the designer and intelligence in the rendering system – in this case the eBook. Paul Luna used the eBook as an opportunity to reflect on the interactions between surface and structure in typographic display – while looking at the specifics of the Microsoft and Adobe implementations of eBook and what they mean for designer, publisher and reader. The Microsoft system, he said Concentrates on the traditional surface values of the book But underneath is very like traditional page composition software. It is tagged in XML, structured n fact if not in appearance Restores the book metaphor to the screen. It reintroduces the ‘type area’ by defining margins and deals with the screen as a page – scrolling is gone, and the navigation is backgrounded. Adobes eBook Foregrounds the metrics of the page – but the page as originally designed for print Stresses the advantages of its fit with print-industry standard workflows But in achieving reflowable text throws away the decisions made by the designer. Comparing the two formats, Paul said that a bad Microsoft eBook is dull and uninspiring, while a bad Adobe Book is unreadable. Neither, he said, deals with the staple of academic publishing, the footnote – though later he was cheered by Microsoft’s forthcoming annotation features. Publishers all see eBooks as a possible add-on market. They are approaching it in different ways – for instance HarperCollins has set up an eBook unit to trawl the company\s global list for work which might have an eBook market, while Paul\s ex-employer Oxford University Press has contracted out eBook publishing to hardware spellchecker seller Franklin. Making eBooks more usable and controllable means a number of things, Paul believes. Designers must engage the enemy more closely – and tell the software companies what they need loudly and clearly. The software companies need to improve the available assets for surface typography. I think he ment that we need more control at the point of design over how things look. We must forget ‘fogeyish’ typography, trying to ape the look of a book in an entirely different medium This point echoes John Berry’s, but probably is lost for a while – all technologies mimic their predecessors and must do to be acceptable to users, who are baffled by entirely new communication metaphors. Designers and software builders must consider structure. ‘What we want from an eBook’, Paul said, ‘is a composition system, not a rendering system. [The reflowable text display] is the nearest that typography can get to the state of language.’ This was a powerful and impressive metaphor. He meant that, just as a spoken sentence is modified as you speak to suit your context, so text display on an eBook must learn to behave at the point of rendering according to the display environment it finds itself in. The exciting stuff is likely to be, for the designer, defining the rules which manage that on-the-fly rendering/transformation. The depressing bit is that eBook is not a very clean technology, and there is no common implementation of standards by the main players. Both Microsoft and Adobe are putting a lot of effort into these projects, but both are concerned to maintain a proprietary hold on the delivery system. Adobe wants to shoehorn Acrobat into yet another ill-fitting niche while claiming some compatibility with eBook open standards (and, to be fair, offering the vague promise of XML eBook conformance one day). Microsoft is concerned with cementing its lock on eCommerce activities through its very varied digital rights management activity. Neither has the reader as the focus of its attention, and neither is likely to pay much heed to the designer. Posted on: 9:29, 21 September 2001 |