“All aesthetics is functional, even if simply for our souls.”
Printed books are beautiful things. Even the cheapest paperback, if you look closely, has the hallmarks of a process where individuals made thoughtful choices to enhance the reading experience. From the chosen typeface to the page breaks to the spacing and separators, books are made to be read. To see the importance of those choices, just send a large raw text file to your printer and try to read it!
In contrast, many e-Books are especially ugly even given the limitations of their form. Early in my life as a Kindle owner, I bought the e-book of Poul Anderson’s “Brain Wave,” one of my favorite science fiction novels. I was disturbed to find that the e-book rendering lost many structural cues, such as the appearance of breaks between sections within a chapter.
There are some great slides from Liza Daly which illustrate this problem (the names have been changed!) and make some points which I hadn’t originally realized.
One of the reasons for the ugliness is that e-book production is typically an afterthought on the print production process and is often out-sourced and based on unproofed versions of the text. Furthermore, e-book renditions are often not proofed significantly by editors or publishers.
A deeper cause is that many print designers (and editors and publishers) have a prejudice about online design based on the ubiquity of bad design and the early days of the web. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
Design is the process of thoughtfully making the choices you have around the choices you don’t. Book designers have a huge number of design dimensions and some significant constraints. The constraints (beyond largely fixed content) are mostly financial in origin, such as the use of color, the size of pages and the linearity of their arrangement. In the early days of online reading, the design space was nightmarish, because designers had very few choices and the choices they didn’t have were also variable, reflected in the diversity and adjustability of early browsers or display applications.
One of my friends and heroes at the MIT Media Lab was a graphic designer and visionary named Muriel Cooper. Muriel was a character (in the best of senses) who had started the Visible Language Workshop at MIT after working as a book designer for MIT Press. The work of Muriel and her students, starting in the 1980s, was about making new media (long before it was thus named) beautiful.
They started by fixing some obvious sources of ugliness: aliased fonts and crayola color models. They went further to use the bleeding edge of technology to create new choices for designers, leveraging effects like three-dimensionality, translucency, or animated fonts. Eventually, they developed models for how designs could automatically adapt to the devices or choices of readers. These ideas found their way into online design by inspirational example, engagement with vendors, and passionate disciples.
Today it is possible to make beautiful online documents, even for the Web, using declared standards that are quickly converging towards ubiquity. There are some lovely examples at the CSS Zen Garden and even some examples of e-books at the ePub Zen Garden.
There is no longer a good excuse for ugly e-books.
