Reading large volumes of text requires effort. It’s quite simply tiring. Over the (hundreds and hundreds of) years, we’ve developed standards for reading that help us get through large swaths of text by mitigating the effort it takes to do so.

This is why prose books are as wide as they are, why there are page layout standards like the grid, margins, and line spacing. And why there are additional typographic standards which address clarity and ease of reading, including type structure, letter spacing, line length, optical alignment, ligatures, and, of course, justification and hyphenation.

And it’s here where e-books fall flat on their face.

To ensure consistent letter and word spacing (thereby reducing the burden of reading), a long form book should be justified, with hyphens, like this:

From Cory Nelson, who created the image above:

There is nothing about EPUBs that prevent e-readers from performing this kind of typesetting automatically.

In other words this isn’t a technical issue with the EPUB standard. And yet:

Kindle doesn’t do this.

Kobo doesn’t do this.

Nook doesn’t do this.

This is, frankly, disgusting. These devices are designed only for reading. And they’re making reading harder. Can you imagine making a product that doesn’t effectively serve it’s sole purpose? (Yes, I know this is done all the time. But that doesn’t make it right. Or acceptable. Or any less infuriating. And this is books. Lazy product designers shouldn’t be messing with books and then proliferating their mess across millions of devices.)

The publishing industry should be embarrassed for putting up with this. Amazon in particular should be mortified for selling these devices, if not apologetic. I mean, the world’s biggest book store is making books harder to read. Not. Cool.

Yes, the standard digital annoyances of vendor lock in and DRM still apply in the digital book world. But these are the least of our concerns when the major e-book readers don’t support basic legibility standards.

Hopefully someone figures something out soon because I’m uncomfortably caught between what seems to be an insane act of using vast resources to print a book that’s exponentially larger and heavier than an e-book reader that then needs to be shipped around the world and carried by me, and not being able to read anything on these useless devices.

Some more reading on this subject:

Justifying the Nook: A case for PDF from Cory Nelson.

Publishing: Why Typography Matters from Michael Hait.

How is an eBook like Pizza Hut pizza? from Michael Marcus.

A side note on other formats:

Apple has done a pretty decent job with iBooks, supporting justification and hyphenation. The trouble is, they have their books in skeuomorphic software that shows a stack of pages that never change their thickness, no matter how much of the book you’ve read. And their format is DRM locked to iBooks software which is only available on the glowing screen of the iPad, which is less conducive to reading, while the iPad itself is larger and heavier than any of the e-book readers noted above.

And that leaves us with PDFs, which none of the major publishers are supporting because they’re presumably scared of piracy, and which don’t adjust to different screen sizes.

Update:

Ah, there’s a full screen view in iBooks that gets rid of the silly skeuomophic pages. Thanks for the heads up, Matt!

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In that case, an act where I was rooting for Apple simply because I despise protectionist agendas and see video content owners as far more egregious in this area than music, which does not bode well for consumer access (and with the rhetoric on that one being that it followed “NBC’s decision to not renew its agreement with iTunes”, rather than a unilateral decision on Apple’s part to make this content unavailable).

But books. Man, I (yes, naively) expect Amazon to do whatever it takes to make every book available to me. To be a leader in access to knowledge. In that sense, the Google of the retail world.

So when Amazon intentionally makes unavailable an entire publisher—including most of their subsidiaries—that was a wake up call. And I immediately thought: boycott Amazon, let them know why. Buoyed further by the excellent outsider’s guide to the fight article from Charlie Stross. But, yesterday, Amazon capitulated.

What continues to be worrying about this whole tact is that they didn’t simply cease selling the eBook version of MacMillan titles, but the “Kindle Team” had the print versions pulled as well, which were not suffering from any pricing dispute. Scary stuff.

Short of having an open burning of Macmillan books, this feels oh so wrong to me. Am I overreacting? I feel Amazon has a responsibility to make the written word available to me. To leverage their reach to ensure that nothing is out of reach.

By selectively choosing what they carry, the expectation Amazon is now setting is that diving into their catalogue on a particular topic is not at all thorough. Meaning I should work on sourcing and considering writing from other sources now. Back to niche retailers who curate intentionally and with due consideration for the content rather than eliminate choice based on the almighty dollar.

Back to my take on the actions of Apple as compared to Amazon. NBC is just entertainment, which was distracting from the real issue: preventing access to knowledge and information hurts us. If Amazon had pulled Harlequin, I would have ignored this larger issue in much the same way I did with NBC. But the fact remains, whether it’s a cultural landmark, or a valued treatise, it should be available to us. (Not withstanding my disinterest in any of this eBook/online video content which is DRMed up the wazoo). And that’s what makes the comments following Amazon’s capitulation even more disconcerting.

There’s a lot of pro-Amazon drivel here about giving in to bad old Macmillan, that Amazon should fight for the consumer, and that a Macmillan boycott is underway. This is not a reasonable perspective. If Macmillan wants to price an eBook at $14.99, that’s their prerogative and the consumer has a choice of whether or not they want to purchase at that price. The same can be said about a song or sitcom but, on the other hand, they’re just not the same thing. The process of researching, writing, and publishing a book, be it fiction or non-fiction, does not correlate to a standard television program which also has far more ubiquitous and available distribution. I see books as being more delicate and, most importantly, Amazon has far more control over distribution than Apple does with NBC. The equivalent would be if your cable provider said they’re going to stop airing a channel because the channel wouldn’t provide them with Online or On-Demand content. The cable provider would of course be skewered by the press and by the people.

So let’s be mindful of what’s at play here and, as consumers, stay focused on the big picture. There are battles shaking down with new distribution models, where behemoths of industry are going to continue to fight to squeeze every last dollar out of their supply chain relationships. In the end, for consumers, the only thing that should matter to us is that we don’t lose access, whether due to pricing or licensing limitations.

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Whenever I’m faced with a creative struggle and procrastination rears its ugly head (like facing the daunting task of writing my first blog entry), I pick up this book on ‘Creative Resistance’ – the resistance that hinders our potential and prevents us from greatness. This resistance stops us from sitting down to do what we must – whether it be a business venture or new exercise regime.

The War of Art is a super fast read and broken up into tiny easy to digest chapters. This makes it ideal for a quick boost – offering accessible tidbits of advice, inspiration, and that ever-so-needed kick in the butt.

I have highlighted some of the quotes that I reference frequently. I thrive on inspirational quotes. I feel that unless you’ve totally embraced or adopted an important message, you can’t read it or be exposed to it enough. Whether you have it tacked on to your ‘vision board’ or highlighted in a book, having those powerful words as a constant reminder is invaluable. Here is a selection of gems from The War of Art that I found to be inspiring.

On ‘Resistance’

“Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance.”

“The more important a call or action is to our soul’s evolution, the more Resistance we will feel toward pursuing it.”

“Never forget: This very moment, we can change our lives. There never was a moment, and never will be, when we are without the power to alter our destiny.”

On ‘Combating Resistance’

“I write only when inspiration strikes … Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o’clock sharp.”

“I’m keenly aware of the Principle of Priority, which states (a) you must know the difference between what is urgent and what is important, and (b) you must do what’s important first.”

“The amateur believes he must first overcome his fear, then he can do his work. The professional knows that fear can never be overcome.”

“The professional knows that Resistance is like a telemarketer; if you so much as say hello, you’re finished. The pro doesn’t even pick up the phone. He stays at work.”

“The professional keeps his eye on the doughnut and not on the hole. He reminds himself it’s better to be in the arena, getting stomped by the bull, than to be up in the stands or out in the parking lot.”

“The professional learns to recognize envy-driven criticism and to take it for what it is: the supreme compliment. The critic hates most that which he would have done himself if he had had the guts.”

‘Beyond Resistance’

“Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, magic, and power in it. Begin it now.”

“The instinct that pulls us toward art is the impulse to evolve, to learn, to heighten and elevate our consciousness.”

“We come into this world with a specific, personal destiny. We have a job to do, a calling to enact, a self to become. Our job in this lifetime is not to shape ourselves into some ideal we imagine we ought to be, but to find out who we already are and become it.”

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