By India Amos, Textist | @indiamos
Ed note: For part one of this ongoing series on eReader applications and their rendering of ebooks across devices, click here for more on annotations in Kobo, Google, Apple, Nook, and Kindle. For more on Ebook Design & Formatting, join Peter Meyers and Anne Kostick on Thursday, August 4th at 1 PM ET for an interactive review of ebooks across platforms.
When I first decided to try reading an e-book on my iPod Touch, I assumed—since I’ve been designing and typesetting book interiors for more than a decade and have strong opinions about what makes text readable and appealing—that poor typography would be my biggest complaint about the e-reading applications I tried. It turns out that as with print books, I’m much more tolerant of ugly, poorly set text than I expected. Just as I’m capable of losing myself in the pages of a cramped, blurry mass-market paperback if the story is one I want to read, so, too, can I block out consciousness of the less-than-ideal typography of an e-book viewed on a small screen. In fact, though I haven’t tried to empirically test this theory, I believe I might read novels faster on my iPod than I used to do on paper. Or maybe I comprehend better, or remember more of what I read.
Still, I’d rather have the option of making the text look good, and if an e-book’s appearance seriously offends me, I’m batty enough to crack it open and change it. I now actually get paid to do this, which sometimes feels like I’ve hit upon the best scam ever. (Other times, not so much. See below under anchovies.)
As any text designer can tell you, there are entire degree programs, conferences, and libraries of books on the subject of typography. So I won’t try to explain the whats, hows, and whys in a late-night blog post; but take my word for it that in good print design, there is a balance between several elements, including but not limited to
- typeface style (serif or sans serif? old style, transitional, modern, Clarendon? geometric, gothic, grotesque?)
- type size (which, as you know if you’ve ever fooled around with typefaces when trying to hit a certain page count on a term paper, is about more than just point size)
- leading—the amount of space between lines of type
- measure—the width of the block of text
- alignment—is the text
- centered, as in section headings and some truly terrible books of poetry?
- fully justified, with the spaces between words squeezed or expanded so that they form a solid, sharp-edged text block?
- rag right, aka left-justified?
- rag left, aka right-justified—extremely rare in book-length texts but sometimes seen in advertising, to make things line up in a pretty but hard-to-read way?
- word spacing
- letter spacing
- margins
A print designer can also control whether and how words are hyphenated (for example, I don’t like to see a two-letter fragment before or after a hyphen; it’s ugly and, I feel, more likely to lead to misreading, so I always set hyphenation tools to keep a minimum of three letters on either side of a break), as well as when and how deeply the first lines of paragraphs are indented (for instance, we usually don’t indent the first line beneath a heading, because it’s already obvious that a new paragraph has started).
So how much of this can an e-book designer control?
Consistently across all platforms? Pretty much nothing.
You can present serving suggestions, as it were, but you cannot plate the dish. Some e-reading devices and software automatically add ketchup (if not freaking anchovies) to everything, some serve everything up on divided styrofoam plates, and the reader can nearly always at least add salt.
Welcome to the dark side of my job.
Still, whether it makes me sometimes want to fork my eyes out or not, I promised you a rundown of typographic options in an assortment of e-reading applications, so that is what you will get.
Picking the fonts
When layfolk think of typography at all, what they usually think of is picking the fonts. Fonts are fun. Who among us didn’t sit there trying out all those goofy typefaces, upon first installing Microsoft Word? (What? You are too young to remember life before Word? Sorry, I can’t hear you—let me turn my hearing aid up. Squeeeeeeek.) Changing the font changes the way a text feels; it can make the author seem nerdy or cool; it can keep you from getting lost; it can change how you rate a text. Or it can make you throw the book across the room in disgust. But, wait—if you’re reading an e-book, you no longer have to keep your pitching arm limber! You can just change the font. To what?
Kindle.app: 0 fonts
Kobo: 4 fonts
Nook.app: 5 fonts
 |  |
All displayed in using the same font in the menu, so you’d better know what each one looks like.
iBooks: 6 fonts
 |  |
Google Books: 7 fonts
Is more better? Not really. I use Georgia most of the time (sometimes Verdana, if I’m reading in night mode); couldn’t care less about the rest. YMMV.
Size matters
One of the big selling points of e-books is that each reader can adjust the size of the text to suit his or her preferences. There’s no longer a need to track down bulky, expensive large-type editions, or to use a magnifier to make conventionally sized text legible; you can just make the type larger, and everything will reflow to fit the screen.
How big is big, though, and how small is small? The following pairs of screenshots show the largest and smallest text in each app.
Google Books
 |  |
iBooks
 |  |
Kindle.app
 |  |
Kobo
 |  |
Nook.app
 |  |
Attentive persons will note that the font displayed on the Nook.app is not Georgia, although that’s what I have the app set to use, and “use publisher settings” is off. Go figure.
Leading
Leading (rhymes with “heading”), also known as line spacing or line height, can have a profound effect on readability. Yet of the e-reading apps I’m looking at, only two let you alter this setting: Nook.app gives you four choices, and Google Books gives you three.
|  |
The screenshots below show the extremes of leading at the smallest and middle font sizes. The leading is proportional to the font size, so as the text gets larger, so does the spacing between the lines.
Nook.app
 |  |
 |  |
Google Books
 |  |
 |  |
Justification
One of the absolute worst things about typography on e-readers is that most apps, and most publishers, fully justify text by default. On a small screen, with primitive hyphenation algorithms, this is what most often makes me want to stab myself in the eye. At a very small font size, it can look okay—
—but full justification is not appropriate for every part of a book—
—and at large font sizes, it can look like a dog’s breakfast:
In my opinion, left-justified or rag-right text would be a much safer default, but that wouldn’t fit in with all the stupid “Look! It’s just like a real book!” chrome that software developers seem to think readers want. More on that in a separate episode.
Fortunately, both Kobo and Nook.app let you either force the justification to rag-right or use whatever justification settings the publisher has specified in the file. Unfortunately, neither app shows the publisher’s settings by default.
| |
Margins
Nook.app is alone among those under consideration in letting the reader change the page margins.
Please check your InterWeb Guide to find out when the next exciting installment will air!
India Amos is Digital Production ePub QA Associate for F+W Media. She has been art director for the daily online magazine Nextbook.org (now Tabletmag.com), a book designer at St. Martin’s Press and Neuwirth & Associates, and managing editor of Seven Stories Press. From 1999 to 2001 she was webmaster of poets.org, the website of the Academy of American Poets. In 2008, she entered the Interactive Telecommunications master’s degree program (ITP) at New York University.
