Thirith on 21/7/2020 at 07:48
Quote Posted by Starker
You can use your own preferred fonts.
I can see how that might be handy, but the flipside is that I've never seen an e-book that I found as nice to look at as a well-set physical book. Good typesetting has an appeal of its own. Though while I am very much a physical book guy, the advantages of e-books are evident.
Starker on 21/7/2020 at 08:26
Sure, the advantages of a fixed page and font size means you can go over the text line by line or even word by word and arrange everything to look the best it possibly can. Then again, not all paper books follow proper typesetting rules either.
Thirith on 21/7/2020 at 08:28
Absolutely. I've bought one or two (physical) books where the typesetting was so unpleasantly bad that I stopped reading them.
Starker on 21/7/2020 at 08:32
To be clear, I still buy physical books. The bastards are expensive, though. I just spent over 150 euros (including shipping) last month to buy 3 books in total.
Nameless Voice on 21/7/2020 at 10:07
I also agree that ebooks are far superior and wouldn't even buy physical books any more - so long as the book in question is only words.
Ebooks are pretty terrible for something like rulebooks or comics, as they can't really handle grids or pictures particularly well (mostly because they're normally being viewed on a relatively small screen.)
Thirith on 21/7/2020 at 10:54
And size definitely makes a difference with artwork. I remember reading Brian K. Vaughan's Runaways first in a small-format collection and later in a larger TPB format, and some of the art had so much more of an impact once it was bigger. For people who just read comics for what happens next, I'm sure that e-readers and tablets are perfectly adequate, but I wouldn't be able to appreciate the art as much.
Nameless Voice on 21/7/2020 at 11:12
To be fair, I think that's more of a formatting problem. You'd be able to see the pictures clearly if it displayed one panel at a time, rather than shrinking down an entire A4 page into an e.g. 8" screen.
Thirith on 21/7/2020 at 11:16
That's definitely true, but a good comic isn't just a series of individual panels. Composition is highly relevant.
Nameless Voice on 21/7/2020 at 11:43
I think it would still work if the comic was designed for that format, e.g. smaller pages.
It's only when you get to that awful "PDF navigation" that things become a problem.
Briareos H on 21/7/2020 at 11:44
Man, eBooks are a case of better newer tech not coming fast enough. I'm still holding out for a full A4 color eInk tablet for books, comics, magazines and newspapers. Please.
At the same time it seems that there is little actual demand for such devices and most people are satisfied with a regular tablet.
Household adoption of a new tech with only niche demand for core improvements is a really bad omen for quality.
Another example for nerds: systemd and Linux.