just sayin’.
I rarely do short pieces. But in the process of trying to get my head on straight after the Yvgenie edit while traveling, I’ve done a Foreigner short piece, involving Ilisidi, and involving her viewpoint. I haven’t got it up on CC yet, but it will be. It’s technically a novelette, but nobody actually knows what that is, ie, it’s shorter than a novella, longer than a short story…but—the dictionary that *doesn’t* reference the SFWA definition calls it a novella. Whatever it is…it’s coming.
Just got back from another long trip. The Kindle let me have reading the whole time, including 2 library books.
I use a non-lit screen. I stare at a lit screen all day and my eyes want a rest. Far from obsolesced. The lit screens are great because they can show color on our pretty covers, but they also run out of power faster, and I like the quietude of my b&w.
Oh! I can’t wait to read it!
I find the SFWA definitions helpful because I work with a lot of brand new authors who have no idea what the word counts mean in terms of publication opportunities. I dealt with one irate person who didn’t understand why her 10k ‘novel’ was not getting offers. I also talked with more than one person who had novels over 300k and thought those were normal.
Then there’s the problem when you start discussing things like the difference in word count for a middle grade novel and an epic fantasy.
All in all, I think I’d rather be writing.
*hoots and does happy dance* — ‘Sidi is one of my mos’ favorite characters in the Foreigner books. The novella/ette thingie is a good way to get “back” and “side” stories out of the way of your book plots. Please feel free to indulge yourself in a Foreigner “novellulu” any time. One or two more such, and that would give you another book. If you do a limited edition, it must have a seal and ribbons on — even if they’re just drawn on. Like the Atevi “souvenir cards” of important occasions (a gratuitous “novellittlebit” story qualifies as an occasion in my book!). It absolutely begs for a seal and ribbons. Even if you just do an E-book. And why shouldn’t E-books be as beautifully embellished as any “dead tree” book? — given the advantages of epublishing programs and whatnot, as well as artwork for covers, why can’t the whole shebang just go digital — illustrators, designers, as well as authors?
PS to Jane: http://theowlunderground.tumblr.com/post/25011189476/the-kitties-first-film-the-white-one-has-a
I might print out a copy for myself and try the formal Ragi seals-and-ribbons treatment just for giggles 😉 if it’s not officially available. Looking forward to the story from ‘Sidi-ji’s perspective, and from Geigi’ji’s. Being human 🙂 does switching viewpoints to try to think completely atevi make your head hurt at all?
My opinion: how great it would be to have an Ilisidi running for President, instead of the current crop of inadequates.
To answer a couple of questions:
An “app” is short for “application program” and comes from Macintosh parlance. The Mac originally called its programs “applications,” and that was shortened to “apps” by users. Then when the iPod, iPhone, and iPad came along, the typically small programs they use are called “apps” by default. This has then extended back to “web apps” and “apps” generally, on the Mac but also sometimes on Windows, at least in web browsers.
Ms. Cherryh kindly lists both Calibre and Stanza for the Mac OSX. There is also the Kindle for Mac app (program) for your Mac, available from Amazon’s site. There are likewise Kindle for PC and Kindle for iOS devices, and so on. The iOS devices (iPad, iPhone, iPod) all have the iBooks app directly from Apple. Devices like the Nook have Barnes & Noble’s Nook reader. Others, like the Sony eReader, use their own. Smartphones have these available, plus apps for the Android OS platform or others.
I use an iPad and prefer it to a Kindle, and I find a smartphone (my iPhone) too small to be of much use for ebook reading.
Regarding iOS and Apple’s devices: It is very, very clear that Apple is in the process of merging its Mac OX and iOS operating systems, to bring its ragingly successful iOS functionality and apps over to the Macintosh, and vice versa. That will give them a unified desktop and mobile platform. While the iOS isn’t perfect, it is *very* good from a usability point of view. People with autism spectrum conditions, including Asperger’s, and people with various other conditions or handicaps have found the iPad and iOS devices particularly helpful. See the most recent two Apple Keynote Addresses, the education event back in March 2012 and the WWDC (Apple Worldwide Developer’s Conference) addresses, available via search through Apple’s website or via iTunes. These were downright exciting for anyone involved in teaching, publishing and writing, and handicapped / accessibility needs. (By the way, “accessibility” also covers ordinary ability needs like eyeglasses, hearing aids, injuries like a broken arm, and so on.) I’d recommend everyone should see those two videos, each about an hour long presentation. It is quite obvious Apple is moving to merge the Mac and iOS, and you’ll find more and more in common between the two platforms.
That said, I have used Mac and Windows (and Apple II’s and MS-DOS PC’s before them). Most of my professional life, until the end of the 1990’s, was spent on Macintoshes (I did what used to be called desktop publishing, which was really publication and graphic design on a computer) back before it became the industry standard, back when DTP was a heresy in the printing and publishing world. I’m *good* at proofing and copyediting, among other arts. So I’m familiar with both Mac and Windows. But I am likely moving back to a Mac computer, the next time I have to buy one, in perhaps a couple of years. By then, I’d expect the Mac and iOS platforms and product lines will have merged.
Even a limited edition or small run self-published book, novelette or novel or collection of short works, is rather expensive these days, and that is without metallic ink or gilt foil. It’s doable, but the cost is high, so the author has to outlay the money. However, for someone like CJ or Jane or Lynn, there is a ready fan base that might cover that. Two-color or four-color publication are less prohibitive but still different from single-color, plus a full-color cover and perhaps inserted illustration pages in color or black-and-white. There are the cost of the paper stocks (cover, illustration plates, regular pages) and binding, and any other special goodies (foil stamping or metallic inks, embossing, what-not) are moderately to extremely specialized on top of that. — Plus, it might clash with any publishing contracts. — However, all that said, it can be done, and perhaps it can be done more easily than I think. I have not priced or done something like that in many years. At least one Shejidan forum member has done beautiful specialty work, artisan publications and binding, so she might be up on this.
About that ribbon? A bookmark with ribbon might be a bang-up idea. For that matter, there was a time when hardbound keepsake books, not only Bibles, included a ribbon glued into the binding, for the reader’s convenience. A ribbon or string is a wonderful idea as a handy included bookmark. A separate bookmark is also handy. That could be a fun design project for the Closed Circle team, especially but not only Jane. It might do well as a specialty item, set at whatever cost would profit the Closed Circle authors.
I love the idea of including black-and-white or color illustrations, as a frontispiece or chapter leads or special plates throughout. HTML5, CSS3, and apparently the upcoming EPUB3, offer additional markup tags specifically for things like figures (illustrations) and tables and callouts. Things like drop caps are already possible, but support is iffy, except in web pages, where there is wide support but some display (visual) differences. Small caps are also iffy, but can be offered alternatively through special fonts or font features, and provided for in the CSS styles. We are not yet to the easy provision of newspaper style columns on web pages or in ebooks, but HTML5 and CSS3 are beginning to offer a lightspeed jump ahead in terms of what can be done design-wise for a book, magazine, or other publication in electronic (web or ebook) form. — I do wish the ebook reader applications would honor more of the author’s or designer’s design choices by default, however. (Jane and Lynn are skilled at this, gaining more skills, and CJ is doubtless becoming skilled at it.)
BCS: having worked professionally in book publishing for decades, I know about the costs associated with physical book production. I guess for me having a physical book – and having an arrangement of my friends, the treasured books, on my shelves – is much more attractive than keeping and reading books on a machine. It may be that my views have been partly influenced by having to do so much work on Macs – I already have to read books for most of the day on a Mac for work purposes. The last thing I want to do after that is to switch to another machine to read a book during leisure hours.
The idea for the limited edition novella about Ilisidi wasn’t actually to go the whole hog and have a printed book, but to have one simply produced in a very small run from a home printer. Personally, I don’t mind if there are no illustrations (I find many illustrations in novels garish and unattractive), and welcome the simplicity of single colours and beautiful textures. Instead the (soft) cover could be made from exquisite Japanese paper in the Ragi colours. The inside of the novella would not be in colour.
As a point of interest (perhaps in defence of the printed book), a family friend runs a very successful UK small press that started around three years ago. Each book is printed in a small run of 2,000 numbered copies only. Each is cloth bound in a different colour, with a matching ribbon inside. The front cover has a small motif (an animal) in gold and the type on the spine is also gold. The book size is small – like a small paperback. The paper is thin and off-white, the font a classical serif one. Amazingly at a time when UK books are generally printed in the Far East, these books are printed at an old-fashioned press in the UK. The books are out-of-print literary fiction, but I could see something like that being done for an SF list (think of the delightful old Gnome Press books, though I realize that they did have jackets).
I get what you say about Apple products – they are very seductive. That’s probably partly why I am keeping away from them. I can’t see that using them during leisure hours would help me in any way in my personal development. 🙂
Actually there’s nothing to stop anyone from printing out any Closed Circle book: just bring the pdf into your own processor and print in any font,size, or format on any paper you desire. What you have to figure at that point is how to divide it into — I believe the word is folios— those sections that are printed as a unit and combined in stitching. In paperback printing they work with what’s called a bedsheet, for good reason, which is then cleverly cut apart and assembled. To do it on a home computer, you need probably the control offered by pdf, which would let you predict and control the page arrangement, in two-sided printing. How many pages the sections contain is governed by paper thickness and size. Print it tall, or squat, make it actually fit your bookshelves, etc.
Putting a set of correctly assembled units into a handmade cover is a matter of craft, fairly easy for a small book, not so easy for a fat one, but still doable, should you decide to tackle, say, Ring of Lightning.. Print in the aforementioned sections, get some stout linen thread, wax same, and a punch and needle. Plus make a jig or clamp to help you keep things lined up. This story, depending on type size, is apt to fit in about 4 physical bundles. If you really want to get into this, here’s a link to a supplier of tools and archival-quality stuff, that also has tutorials: http://www.hollanders.com/supplies/
The rest is glue, good endpapers, and interesting cover materials. We do have that little squib on bookbinding somewhere in the tabs above, and as I recall, Hanneke has had a class in the art. If you love the texture of books, nothing can top the hand-bound craftwork. I’ve only done it years ago, as a kid, but there are a lot of online videos which will even coach you in doing your own leather spines with cording, and the marbled endpapers, though I think the Japanese art papers are about as pretty as paper comes. Read the story for enjoyment—and then if you want something to set on your shelf, with any of our books, go for it. If anyone wanted, for instance, to do this sort of thing and even sell copies, as long as you buy each book’s internal file from us, what you’re selling is your craftwork, at whatever price you value it—which should be hefty—and we have no quarrel with that at all.
Our local classical music station, KQAC, streaming at allclassical.org, has just gone through a pledge drive. One of the gifts for substantial donations was an iPOD preloaded (filled?) with a great deal of classical music the station plays. The station manager mentioned during one of the pledge breaks that all the CD’s came with it, “just to make it all legal.” I suppose something like that, selling the book with the PDF on CD would make everything clear, legal, and “above board”.
p.s. the station has listeners on every continent. (Even some from cities with their own classical music stations contribute.) I can recommend it if streaming works for you. 🙂
CJ: thank you for this. I will probably print it out from a PDF.
I did do a course in book conservation a while ago, which taught how to stitch books and bind them, as well as conserve them. I also use InDesign and Quark, so am fairly conversant with laying out books, fonts and the like. Whether I will ever find the time to make a book myself is another matter.
I have made albums in the past, using Japanese paper for the covers, but that’s a much simpler matter than creating signatures (that would do my head in, I think).
Anyway, so long as I can read the novella, that will be fine, even though it won’t physically fit in with my other Bren books.
Ipad, I phone, nook Kindle, pdf, scratch paper – what ever- just bring it on! Ilisidi is one of my favorite characters too and I can’t wait to learn more about her. I love my Kindle but it does not truly replace a”real” book in all ways. The tactile and visual aspects of the products of a small press are a delight and I find page location on the Kindle cumbersome. Thanks BlueCatShip for explanatory notes.
I love my Nook (which I mentioned earlier). I love that it gives me access to readers who are not published by the large print companies. I love that I now have access to (for instance) works by Jane Fancher which I could not get otherwise. I love that ebooks are less expensive than print and that I can grab a new book in a matter of seconds if I see something I really want to read. The combination of those things, and the fact that the Nook is so nice to read on, make it a wonderful addition to my library.
And I do mean addition. I am not giving up print books. My husband and I have well over 5,000 books in our collection. While we have three ebook readers between the two of us, this hasn’t stopped us from buying print books, both hardcover and paperback.
Here is what I truly believe: A book is not the media on which it is delivered. A book is made up of the words, and sometimes the art, which make the story. A person often has preferences for one type of media over another. I don’t. I don’t think of this as an either/or situation, but rather a wonderful opportunity to expand my reading with authors who would not otherwise be available.
Print copies are nice, too. They are also a hellish amount of work to set up. It’s not as simple as taking the ebook version and sending it off to Lulu.com or Createspace. Setting a print run up takes considerable time and effort to get a quality end result. I’m in the midst of learning InDesign so I can do this properly, but this is not a simple process. These books are expensive for the consumer as well, so you have to weigh the amount of work against the possibility of sales. How much time should an author take away from the creation of new work to work on something that might sell ten copies? Twenty copies? If it makes it to one hundred copies, is it worth the time?
I would love a world where all the writer had to do was create the novel and it suddenly appeared in all the various media ready for readers. Unfortunately, there are a lot of factors that go into even the ebook production, let alone something more.
I just want new things to read. I won’t limit where I get them.
I really haven’t worked out page location on my kindle, but it is wonderful for arthritic hands. paperbacks just don’t want to stay open on your lap while you deal with lunch, and reading in bed a heavy old hardback can be really uncomfortable. so hooray for kindle … but of course a real paper book is lovely to see on the shelf, and the kindle is a bit of a grey, samey experience. so I have mixed feelings on the subject. but I will be ever so happy to read Cj’s special treat on my kindle!
If your hands get tired from holding the book, you might look around you for something like this: http://www.thebookseat.com/
Half a year ago my local bookstore started selling them, and I started using a bookseat, a kind of bean-bag support for a book, that holds the pages open and supports the book at the angle you want. Now the whole family has been converted.
It’s also useful for holding an ebook-reader, if your reader hasn’t got the essential buttons too low down to be accessible behind the front strip of clear plastic that holds the book on the seat.
And yes, printing out and binding your own very personal copy of special ebooks is fun, and quite do-able for a small (thin) novella, even just following the Internet-instructions (though I did get a book as well).
Jane’s really fat books were a bit more difficult: the principle is the same, but getting all the pages into a nice smooth book-block is a lot more difficult in practice. I did get quite acceptable results with those, but not quite professional-quality.
I love the idea of an Ilisidi novella, and I think I’ll try my new bookbinding skills on it again!
Sometime back on a half price sale I picked a little book on DIY Bookbinding from O’Reilly: http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920020905.do The one point it doesn’t cover is how to print your pdf four pages to a sheet such that you can fold them into signatures. That gives a nice 8.5 by 5.5 inch book. Some printer drivers do it, or maybe it’s some versions of Acrobat Reader, I’m not sure. I haven’t read through the whole book, even though it’s only 32 pages – one signature, to be exact!
The lay-out options for printing the PDFs depended on the printer and printerdriver when I tried this.
Some give the option to choose layout as ‘booklet’, instead of just portrait or landscape. I had to shop around a bit before I found a printer that gave me this option.
Then you have to take care to give the print-order one booklet at a time. You need to select a multiple of four pages to get a neat booklet: e.g. select the first 16 or 20 pages, print those as booklet, select the next 20 pages, print those as booklet, etc..
Be careful! When I tried this, I had some unnumbered pages at the front, before starting the numbered pages, and this confused the printer when I selected the pages to be printed by the numbers (or maybe it confused me, I don’t quite remember 😉 ).
You can add extra blank pages at the beginning and the end to come to a nice divisible-by-four total. Or repeat the title on an extra blank front-page, and add a blurb on a blank end-page. Depending on how you are binding the book-block into the cover, you can stick the blank first and last pages to the cover-boards, or stick the nice inside-cover paper to the blank first and last pages.
Sapphire, you sound like you need a recommendation for reading ebooks on the Mac. I know Stanza will work; it can be tricky setting up your library but once you work out where your books are being kept you can read easily. Search for ‘Stanza’ to find the application. Calibre is also good, but possibly needs more work to get a basic understanding. I recommend both; I use them on my Mac. You can also play around with Adobe Digital Editions.
arethusa: thank you very much for your recommendation. However, I don’t particularly want to read ebooks on a Mac – what I do want to do is read the novella that is being discussed here. CJ has said it can be supplied as a PDF (I think), and that will do fine. (I could even read it in a plain Word document, since I’m used to reading typescripts in that program.)
I love when your characters insist on being heard. 😉 Can’t wait!
Popping in on a brief break from packing – just to weigh in on the book v. ebook discussion. Packing. I hate moving my books. I think I’ve got it down to 20 boxes by culling those books I know I won’t read again.
I love books. (Decades ago, when the bookstore owner told me I was expeted to TEAR OFF the cover of books, I cried.) (Yes, it’s funny. The manager laughed too.)
I agree that a MMPB, or even a hardback, is *not* the art and craft of the writer.
And I like my new (refurbished) Kindle quite a bit. It *is* much easier on arthritic hands and aging eyes.
But there’s nothing like the romance of the printed page.
I read about bookstores that have printers that can create a paperback version of books in a short time. I read the article this week, I’m just not sure where. Say I found an out of copyright book that had family information in it, I could go to one of these bookstores and pay for a new copy.
As far as that goes, there are “print on demand” publishers like Lulu.com where you can get anything published from a wedding photo album to a graphic novel, to a print novel. You send them your stuff in a certain format (they typically have some kind of setup fee), choose your binding and size option, they print you up one, and then set you up a “storefront” page so that anybody else who wants one goes to that page and buys it from them and you get your cut. The publisher handles S&H. Lulu does Paypal and currency conversions, etc., and they list what currencies they accept, so they’re a world wide deal, accessible by internet. The author does pay a setup fee, but a book is not actually printed until someone buys one. The buyer pays for the publishing of the copy of the book that they buy, and for the postage.
Many a decade ago, in the college library I ran across a type specimen book with a difference. Among the commonly used faces it had set a couple paragraphs, one of factual information, one of creative writing. I noticed clearly how the face affected my perception of the material; that is, how I related to the material and the material related to me. Century Schoolbook is very clear and easy to read, but lacks the “bottom” of a Times New Roman, and neither has the grace to “work” for poetry, like perhaps a Bodoni. The effect is subtle, but is definitely to be considered. I like Garamond.
paul: Adobe Garamond is a font I often favour, particularly for academic books with a lot of tiny text. It’s a very clear, classical font. Times New Roman is the type I opt for in Word documents. Bodoni is also a nice clear font.
I generally don’t like Sans Serif fonts, though they can be OK for headings, small amounts of text and advertising. They are less clear than the Serif fonts. They are, however, fashionable, and are being used fairly indiscriminately by designers who don’t know any better.
WOL: thanks for reminding me about the ‘print on demand’ service. I now remember receiving an illustrated book from an author, which apparently only cost him about £25 to produce by a company such as the one you mention. The quality wasn’t as good as that of a ‘properly’ printed book, but it was still pretty good.
Back in the BC days, before computers, one of the characteristics of importance in faces was the “internal weighting”. That is, for example, the difference in the thickness of the cross-bar of “H” compared to the verticals. (There’s a specific word for it I cannot remember, nor find quickly.) It goes back to calligraphy and quill pens. The Bodoni family have a large difference–that crossbar is quite thin. That means it has to be printed on a very good quality, probably coated paper. Times New Roman was, among other things designed with a much smaller difference, wider narrow lines, so it would be readable on low quality newsprint paper. The Caslon family is somewhere in between.
When Steve Jobs passed away rather much was made of the one college course he took here at Reed College that informed his design sense was calligraphy.
Fonts in the computer age are funny things. Many ereaders allow you to change the font and font size, for instance, for your preferred reading experience, though there is a limited range of choices. I have discovered that in writing, it sometimes helps to choose an odd font (and sometimes even background color) in order to give the story a different ‘feel’ while in the creative mode. It hardly matters. Two or three clicks and I can reset to the acceptable norms.
POD is the best way for small press and independent authors to go. Again, it’s a case of allowing readers access to books which the big publishers, with the costs of huge print runs (because small print runs are not economical) will not produce.
We live in a world of choices when it comes to reading. Far more choices than we’ve ever had in the past. It’s wonderful for the reader and scary for the writer. (grin)
Paul, the term you’re looking for is “horizontal or vertical stress” in a font. Sans-serifs usually have almost 1:1, low stem angle stress. So-called “Modern” serifs, Bodoni being a model, tend to have very high vertical stress. What this mimics is the angle of the calligrapher’s pen nib to the page, or the angle of the stone mason’s scribing tool to draw out the letters before carving them. The Romans used something like two charcoal sticks spaced and tied to a block of wood as a scribing tool, which, when held at an angle, gave the tilt or stroke weight stress similar to a calligrapher’s pen nib or reed brush, and that was used by them and the Greeks for their monumental capitals, including the Trajan column.
Bodoni is pretty, but difficult to use. Faces with high contrast like it are said to have high “sparkle” and can tend to have ink dropouts on the page.
I tend to like New Baskerville better. There’s a little less contrast and a little more warmth, but it still looks very refined.
There are a number of sub-categories for serifs and sans-serifs, depending on which system you use. The most basic has: serifs: { old-style, transitional, modern, clarendon/egyptian }; sans-serifs: { grotesques, geometric, humanist }; There are others for scripts and calligraphic faces, display/fantasy faces, pi/dingbat symbol faces, monospace typewriter faces, and so on.
There are around twenty to fifty or so workhorse font-families that used to be the ones nearly every printer/typesetter bureau had. Digital font design tools brought a huge explosion in new fonts and options. Many are excellent, many are so-so or derivative, you just have to go with what looks best and suits the needs. Things like legibility for print and screen and telling one letter from another (I and l, O and 0 in particular) enter into it. That, and the human desire for beauty and perfection, individuality and suiting a particular design or ethos. So now we have some very new and very good fonts alongside the old standbys.
Palatino and Optima are two of my favorites. A variant of Century (there are several) would be in there, and Franklin Gothic. — I could go on for way too long on fonts.
There’s an emerging “web fonts” technology to allow use of any font on web pages, and it’s usable now, but three of the biggest players, Adobe and Monotype and Linotype have chosen web licensing which many (most) designers would find problematic, whereas others, like Bistream, are better about it. There are indie font designers. There also free usage fonts out there, hosted by places like FontSquirrel. The ability to use whatever fonts a designer wants on the web is something designers have wanted a very, very long time now, and should lead to better looking and more varied web page designs.
That same technology should help ebook design too, since ebook formats are based on web formats underneath, with additions to provide ebook designs and features.
Yes, absolutely, a typeface (font) makes a big difference in the mood or emotional impact of a book or other publication. Novels, books of fiction, are in some ways straightforward, but their design has subtleties built in, in ways that fit the needs of the storytelling, and to give a little variation and beauty to the page.
I’d vote yet again for illustrations, typically black and white or greyscale, but color plates can be added, if they’re planned into the design to make printing and assembly economical for the author/publisher. In other words: If you simply put a full-color illustration or photo wherever you want in the publication, then the whole thing has to be done in full color, or you drop down to black and white. Better is to plan where full-color plates go in the publication. Then the bulk is done in black and white, and the color plates are inserted, such as between signatures, or in the middle, beginning, or end of the publication. Two color (black text, one spot color (often red), and white page) are typical. Then it usually goes to full four-color process, possibly with one or two spot colors added.
In the discussion earlier: Page layout programs (old PageMaker, new InDesign) and word processors (Word, WordPerfect, etc.) provide for what’s called “page creep” in the “gutter,” the inner margin, where the signatures are bound into the book or magazine. There is a tiny amount that this moves, from the outermost page in a folio/signature to the innermost, because the pages are stacked, stitched or glued, then bound into the larger publication, unless they’re “perfect bound,” all the same distance. (There are reasons one might do either method.) So if/when doing this by hand (like the old print shops did before Industrial Revolution tools) then you need to watch for it in larger (fatter) folios/signatures.
Hah, people like Morris Fuller Benton or Fred Goudy or Ozwald Cooper, would’ve greatly approved of hand-crafted publications, though. (Who are they? three famous type designers, early 20th century. We all use or see type they designed every single day. Each, especially Benton, were big proponents of arts and crafts, the human element in design, rather than mere mechanical perfection. (There were many others.) — Benton’s name isn’t immediately obvious in typefaces, but he did several. Goudy and Cooper did more than you’d think. See also Hermann Zapf and Adrian Frutiger. 🙂
Tangent? Who me? 😉
I forget the name now (it was 1966 after all 😉 ) but I remember one characteristic of my favorite was the cross bar of the “e” sloped up left to right, maybe 10-15 degrees. I thought that added an extra touch of elegance.
One of my favorite fonts is Trebuchet, mostly because of the name. I’m a sucker for an old school siege weapon 🙂
This is the article I was talking about! The Expresso printer is in limited use, and in pictured in an independent bookstore.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/industries/independent-bookstores-embrace-digital-publishing-with-espresso-book-machine/2012/06/11/gJQA0AV1TV_story.html
BTW, CJ, Jane, and Lynn, don’t let our mentions of typefaces or other things deter you all from the design choices *you* want for your ebooks. The advice I gave, above, on typefaces omits a huge amount, including many wonderful options for in-print and on-screen publications. The three of you have good intuitive design sense and some training. (And ebooks still don’t offer the designer the control he or she would want, unfortunately.)
There’s a book on EPUB3 coming out in November/December from O’Reilly Press, another of their “animal guide woodcut” cover series:
Garrish, Matt. Gylling, Markus. EPUB3 Best Practices. © O’Reilly Press. 2012-11-22.
I have it on pre-order from Amazon. No ebook version available as yet, but I would expect it, and will be disappointed if not.
O’Reilly has a mention of an ebook version: http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920024897.do – it’s half the price of the printed copy. In addition, Matt Garrish has two free books about epub3 that will turn up in a search there.
Jane takes great care choosing typefaces for her books. I’m a little more inclined to go for whatever’s most available in conversion. I’m such a slob….
I love fonts. I love testing them and playing with them, and even when they don’t go beyond the first draft, it’s still fun.
But the truth is there is only one thing you need to know on epublications and fonts and that’s if what you’ve put out is going to work well on at least all the major ebook readers. This is part of the reason why between Russ and I we have Nook, Kindle and Sony.
I’d rather have a simple, readable font rather than something that ‘fits’ the story but isn’t as easy to read. The same with print fonts. I’ve passed on books when I noticed how difficult the print was to read, whether from size or style.
Good for her!!! 🙂 That’s why there are book designers. It does matter for certain sorts of content and production.
Apropos of the mention of Steve Jobs’ passing, I was reading today about Twitter’s “generation gap”. One of the mentions was someone tweeting:
“Who the [heck] was Steve jobs?
Sent from my iPhone.”
“OMG, you mean the Titanic was real? I thought it was just a movie!”