Drop caps, raised caps, other fancy initials

[Andre Jute]

It seems like every time I send a post, I step on someone's dreams of making beautiful books. Sorry. The problem is that several of the opportunities that existed in print to make beautiful books are incompatible with the current ebook formats. It needn't be so, but it is so, and it won't change. If you dream of beautiful books, don't read this.

Drop caps, raised caps, illustrated caps (I designed the Enivirex set), illuminated caps, all of these are very nice, and different, and no doubt makes the writers feel special. But I wouldn't advise any writer to do them unless he intends having only only or two books, ever, and spending his life maintaining the code.

I view books as permanent artifacts. ebooks are already a computerite mess of competing formats. None of these formats are in the slightest stable over time. For writers to add to the mess with unnecessary flourishes like special caps that at every small change of the standard, or its implementation by yet another willful vendor going his own way, will have to be "fixed", simply enslaves that writer as unpaid labour to every tomdick&harry vendor with dreams of cornering a market.

We're sitting right on top of an example. Amazon actually owns the open MOBI standard for ebooks, which is excellent. But for their own ebook, the Kindle, in pursuit of their (now failed) dream to corner the ebook market, Amazon created the proprietory format AZW. That it's a subset of MOBI and that there is interchangability to a considerable extent is irrelevant; it probably just happened because Amazon lacked the skill or more likely the time to do a thorough job of separating the two, not because the intention wasn't there.

There is nothing to stop anyone with the clout creating a proprietary format, or using their influence to change a standard format, or simply, as Apple has been doing consistently, progressively tightening up demands for compliance with the standard, which may also cause mainenance issues. Example, Apple has a much-trumpeted policy of working, except for its OS (which is its real asset), with open standards. In EPUB their enforcement was at first loose, then tighter, then Apple went over to a newer standard with more onerous demands, though they still permitted Smashwords, for instance, to subvert the demand for an NCX linked index for authors wanting entry to the premium program with a beginning-middle-end approximation, three links. Currently Apple is demanding, according to a letter I have from D2D, in conformity with the latest standard, that "all EPUB spines must contain a complete listing of all chapters or book sections". This on a novel with over 80 sections, which will make an index of dull "Chapter 37" items for pages on end! Imagine the work in redoing that if some point of NCX coding changes!

Before I actually comply with this mechanically stupid demand, I'll see if I can't fake out the system by removing the word "Chapter" and just leaving the number -- only inserted as an aid for Dakota to keep track in posting the serial of the co-written book to Wattpad http://www.wattpad.com/story/3220999). It seems to me likely that an unlinked "chapter" is the trigger word the bot searches for to draw manual attention to your book.

Full disclosure. As you can see in the samples, we did drop caps in the paperback version of STIEG LARSSON Man, Myth & Mistress [Paperback] but that was made from PDF's made by us out of proper setting in QuarkXPress, not from an EPUB, so we have permanent (1) control. We also had a good design for IDITAROD a novel of The Greatest Race on Earth [Paperback]. The AZW/MOBI/EPUB formats just lost all that work in both books. That taught me a lesson about wasting expensive design time on vendors and formats that don't deserve it or appreciate it.

D2D. Smashwords, Apple, Amazon, the lot of them, should print a warning on all these formats: "Your hard work isn't safe, or fixed for long." That incidentally, applies even in PDF, which has had several "upgrades" of dubious utility since it first saw the light of day. Apple and Adobe, the graphic designers' favorites, do make strenuous efforts to remain backwards compatible, but eventually they run out of road, and it remains to be seen whether the new Apple management will be as committed to protecting the earlier output of loyal customers as Steve Jobs was, as all this effort costs. In this regard, I wouldn't count on Amazon even to know what I'm talking about, never mind do anything about it if cost them a single cent. To Amazon a writer is a disposable commodity, same as someone selling a packet of slightly tissues.

(1) Sure, I know, even a PDF can be opened and messed with -- I patch up PDFs all the time without returning to the source material -- but it requires expensive software and a steep learning curve, making PDF the least vulnerable of all the ebook formats.

In case you want to look at the two books I mention:

[J.A.]

My non-existent layout skills are why I'm terrified to attempt a print version.

[Andre Jute]

J.A. wrote: "My non-existent layout skills are why I'm terrified to attempt a print version."

Proves my point exactly. It looks easy when an expert with many years of experience does it. But involves a whole bunch of other arts, very time consuming to learn, of which the three trickiest are typography, judgement of proportion at several scales, and color (very misleading shorthand, technically not a color, tone, tint or shade but the grey appearance of a black and white page). The parenthetical qualification demonstrates the difficulties of just learning the vocabulary! In COLOUR FOR PROFESSIONAL COMMUNICATORS (an introductory book!) I gave a whole page to just this single concept of the mixes of black, white (paper colour, not an ink), and colour (the real pigment this time) http://coolmainpress.com/andrejuteGDi...