[ramonoski]

As a regular purchaser of ebooks I can think of many reasons why they're convenient, from availability (maybe even the paperback is out of print) to price (maybe the shipping costs double than the book). But I don't think anyone actually finds them preferable to the real thing.

Justin is right that ebooks present a lot of problems in terms of formatting and content. That said, I think the physical books can also be problematic. A good book is more than the content; there has to be a balance to all its elements, from the proofreading to the typesetting (font, line height, number of lines per page, margins, et al) to the binding. If all someone cares about is the content, then they might as well just get the ebook! It pains me to say that some books I've bought by authors I admire and with superb content are, well, less than ideal in terms of design. Tacky fonts, ridiculously huge indents, the tiniest margins, no hyphenation* not even when it creates troublesome lines (i.e. a line consisting of only four or five long words with a lot of empty space inbetween), not using smallcaps (or using fake smallcaps... not all types are designed with such feature), questionable design choices—like, off the top of my head, SETTING A DEFAULT NUMBER OF (SMALL)CAPS AT THE BEGINNING OF EACH chapter even if they cut off mid sentence. And many more.

I realize taking all this into consideraion is time (and money) consuming, particularly for smaller presses, and that, well, not everyone is aiming to make gorgeous editions like Egaeus or Centipede. But, if the idea is to make books more valuable than their digital counterpart, then some thought and work must be put into them. If both the ebook and the paper/hardback are hastily put together, then, well, that doesn't help much, does it.

But that was probably a rant for a different thread...


*English hyphenation is very tricky, since the words have to be broken up etymologically. In Spanish, for instance, the division is syllabic so even a monkey could do it.