At the time, some of these improvements were in their infancy and a little rough around the edges. Safari’s Reader, for example, was a Safari 5, desktop-only feature that removed the clutter of multi-column, ad-filled, multi-page articles. Now it can be found in Safari on iOS and on the desktop.

More importantly, Apple has very pleasantly moved from the same justified nonsense you’d see on a Kindle to type that’s justified with hyphens. This means we’ve gone from this type of barely readable Reader layout:

To a much more readable:

(Unfortunately, it looks like Spin has overridden the default reader settings and the original OK GO article pictured above is a little fubared in Reader.)

Safari has also corrected an issue with hyphens from back in 2010 where copying and pasting a passage left the hyphens and spaces where the text wrapped to a new paragraph on the original website.

And now with these improvements to reading in Safari, it’s with great pleasure that we’ve now updated this site so each article is justified with hyphenation, whether you’re using the full website on Safari or Firefox, or Safari’s Reader on the iPad. (Alas, Tumblr’s mobile version and Safari’s iPhone Reader don’t support this, and Chrome doesn’t know what hyphens are.) Otherwise, enjoy!

The post Towards better readability on the Web, 2012 edition. appeared first on Say Yeah!.

The image on the left shows the consistent spacing of left-justified text. Still hard to read over long periods, but better than having the inconsistent spacing between words on a line that you get with justified text that doesn’t use hyphens (pictured right).

But here come the new Kindles.

With the release of new Kindle devices last week, it was my hope that the world’s largest e-book seller would right this wrong and make reading that much easier for those of us who would like to move from print to digital.

Unfortunately, the first thing I noticed when going to the new Kindle Paperwhite promotional page was this extremely poorly justified promo image:

Look at the giant spaces between words on that 4th line. You can park a bus in any one of those spaces.

So much for Amazon addressing this issue that’s preventing me from getting on the Kindle bandwagon.

Then again, there may be a bigger issue in the e-book ecosystem than hyphenation. One that affects all the main e-book vendors, from books to comics to textbooks. And that’s DRM.

DRM, nothing learned.

We’ve been down this road before with music, and it appears book distributors and publishers are throwing up the exact same inscrutable barriers, locking us into formats and software that has an unknown shelf life, preventing us from controlling how portable our media is and what devices we consumer it on. All the same hostile behaviour towards consumers we did away with in the music industry (at least for purchased downloads, which is all that concerns me).

David Crow’s just acknowledged many of these e-book issues, motivated to reflect on the media he’s been buying due to cost fluctuations the same way I’ve been motivated by remembering my troubles with DRMed music:

Now, I remember DRM because it was a massive pain in the ass when I was buying DRM music and, in one specific example, couldn’t play it for friends, on my own computer, even with my password (other licensing limitations got in the way). That was the last time I bought a DRMed piece of music.

How publishers have allowed this to happen is beyond me. It’s remarkably short-sighted. And generally thoughtless. From Dark Horse Comics FAQ:

DO I OWN THE DIGITAL COMIC I PURCHASED?
You do not. As with Amazon, Nook, and other e-book companies, you don’t own the book you buy. You are licensing the right to read the book on supported and authorized devices.

Boy, that last sentence is irksome. In the case of new releases, I’m generally asked to pay the same price as a physical copy of the book. With the physical copy, I may read it wherever and however I choose, lend it to whomever I choose, and resell or give to someone. But if I pay online, I’m asked to authenticate my purchase via a software of the vendor’s choosing on a device they’ve decided, for now, to support. What a load of shit.

I suggested in response to David’s article that we as consumers do the following:

1. Stop buying DRM content unless it is ludicrously discounted. Enough so that it’s okay that we may lose access to it in any matter of months (due to software or device changes the vendor decides not to support).

2. Either start a general petition or start reaching out to those publishers who are supporting this mess with words of encouragement to move away from DRM and unreasonable pricing for restricted, licensed content.

3. Be sure to give props to publishers offering content unencumbered by DRM either during your checkout process or whenever you have a chance to do so.

In the 24 hours since David shared his article, I’ve read some encouraging news from Rosenfeld Media, a publisher who was already well down the road of not dicking customers over with DRM. And I received a nice email from Dark Horse offering 50% off my next digital purchase, which I politely declined and then directly explained why via email.

You have elected to provide the comics you’re licensing digitally in a closed, rights-restricted format which means that I’m limited in both what devices and software I may use to read them and how I may transfer them to another user (ie, gift or otherwise transfer my ownership). Further, I’m stuck with a format that will surely not remain available to me over time as technologies change and Dark Horse decides to stop supporting their current technologies and/or new and existing platforms and devices.

…

If you adjusted your digital pricing to start at about 75% off printed retail pricing I would suggest that to be a fair price given the above limitations, but I’d rather Dark Horse, a company I’ve long supported, take a stand on this foolish practice of licensing rights-managed content to consumers and, contrary to the ridiculous justification stated in your FAQ, see you follow in the footsteps of O’Reilly, Rosenfeld, and other e-book companies in licensing your content without DRM so your customers have the opportunity to choose the software they wish to consume it on for years to come.

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes suggest on ZDNet that publishers’ fear of Amazon (and Apple) owning the e-book market because DRM locks most books sold to their devices will be enough to drive DRM from books. I’m not as confident as he is, so I encourage you to start a dialogue with the publishers you support.

And, if you’re a Kindle user, prodding them about hyphenation wouldn’t hurt either.

The post Typography and DRM buggery in e-books. appeared first on Say Yeah!.

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!

The post The nastiness of e-books. appeared first on Say Yeah!.

From January 13 to January 17, browse to tiff.net/design for details on joining Gary Hustwit and friends in viewing his three-part exploration of modern design, the docs Helvetica, Objectified, and Urbanized.

The post Design for living, beginning tonight at the TIFF Bell Lightbox. appeared first on Say Yeah!.

It is with a heavy heart that I share with you the passing of one of the great type designers of the past century, Doyald Young. Doyald passed away last week at what seems to me to be an all too young 84 years of age.

I first met Doyald at a Toronto Type Club event in 2004 as he walked through some of his publications. That day I was able to score myself an inscribed copy of Fonts & Logos from a generous designer who was interested in sharing his love of type, offering support and encouragement to a room of comparatively fresh-faced designers.

Over the years I continued to stay in contact with Doyald, talking design, type, and business. We had the good fortune of adapting some of his early letterforms for a client in 2006 after sharing with him our early design ideas. I’m not sure he ever released the full typeface or if it lived, however briefly, in the logo of our now defunct customer.

I’ve continued to support and share Doyald’s work where possible, with I Need Sugar being the latest project to employ a Doyald Young typeface, much to his chagrin for us having “joined the r teardrop to the terminal stem”. (I know this was to avoid mid-word clogging, but the separation at the end of the word really was confusing people!) I’m not sure if Doyald was okay with that logic or not. Alas, that correspondence now remains incomplete.

This is truly a great loss for the design community. But more importantly, a generous, giving man who had so much to offer is gone. Doyald, you’ll be missed.

Photo taken from CreateMake’s Typography of Love.

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