Emotion vs. Logic / by Stéphan Angoulvant

Sweating the details of eBook typography

Google eBooks have landed and with them a slew of desk­top and mobile apps. Ear­lier today I tweeted about my dis­ap­point­ment with eBook typog­ra­phy, and thought I should expound on that comment.

With the iPhone 4 as my test-​​bed, I decided to com­pare the three major iOS eBook apps – namely iBooks, Kin­dle and the newly fledged Google Books. Because of its small screen size the iPhone isn’t an ideal book reader, but I do use it as such and I believe the argu­ments here­un­der will apply to tablet and desk­top read­ers equally well.

The iPhone 4’s Retina Dis­play truly is gor­geous. Fonts on screen have never looked bet­ter. But typog­ra­phy is more than just fonts. In books it is the sub­tle art of mak­ing a page read well allow­ing the reader to truly become immersed in the words themselves.

In order to fairly test the dif­fer­ences between each app I started with a con­fig­u­ra­tion that is com­mon to all three: white back­ground, full-​​screen, ver­ti­cal mode (Google Books has no hor­i­zon­tal mode) and medium-​​size Geor­gia. For con­tent, I chose one of my favorite plays – The Impor­tance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde. Because of the ample stage direc­tions, this eBook stresses many key dif­fi­cul­ties in typography.

Ama­zon Kindle

I’ll start with what I think of as the reign­ing cham­pion of eBooks on iOS. Ama­zon has an excel­lent library that seems to be improv­ing every day, and upon the its first release the app showed promise of becom­ing a great reader.

Kin­dle was the only app in which I actu­ally pur­chased The Impor­tance of Being Earnest. Both iBooks and Google Books pro­vided a free pub­lic domain edi­tion, but at $1.43 the Kin­dle price seemed at tri­fle. I did won­der, before buy­ing it, whether the cost would be jus­ti­fied by par­tic­u­lar efforts in the dig­i­ti­za­tion of the book. I found none.

What is most appar­ent in the Kin­dle app is the bal­anced and thor­ough use of real estate. At such a small screen-​​size every pixel counts and Kin­dle does a good job. The text is well padded and seems to fully fit the screen. We even see hyphen­ation! Unfor­tu­nately the jus­ti­fied text cre­ates awk­ward spaces espe­cially around the word “sand­wiches” in the exam­ple above.

Why is hyphen­ation impor­tant? Hyphen­ation is essen­tial, espe­cially on the iPhone because it allows text to fill the page with­out resort­ing only to jus­ti­fi­ca­tion which tends to cre­ate these “rivers” in the text – columns of white space that detract from the words (see exhibit A).

Char­ac­ter intro­duc­tions and stage direc­tions in Kin­dle are sim­plis­tic in their styling. Not awful but we can do better.

iBooks

iBooks is Apple’s default book reader, I didn’t have any trou­ble find­ing The Impor­tance of Being Earnest as a free pub­lic domain edi­tion. We know that iBooks hasn’t lived up to Steve Jobs’ leg­endary love of type. In fact, the first release’s jus­ti­fied text was so bla­tantly unread­able that pun­dits such as Khoi Vinh and Stephen Coles cried calamity. Since then, Apple has improved the app sig­nif­i­cantly by adding left-​​alignment. Still, hyphen­ation is not to be found.

What we first notice, espe­cially in com­par­i­son to Kin­dle, is the num­ber of extra­ne­ous ele­ments present in full screen mode: sta­tus bar at the top, title of the book, page num­ber and graphic cues left and right of the text. In my opin­ion all of these are unnec­es­sary and impede on the avail­able real-​​estate.

It is also impor­tant to note that pro­tag­o­nists are pre­sented in bold rather than upper­case. This may work well in hor­i­zon­tal mode, or on the iPad, but in this case it cre­ate imbal­ance in the flow of the page espe­cially when com­bined with dis­pro­por­tion­ately large indents. As we will later see, small-​​caps are the tra­di­tional solu­tion for intro­duc­ing char­ac­ters. In lieu of small-​​caps, bold may work bet­ter than all-​​caps but only when given enough room to breathe.

Google Books

With Google Books, find­ing The Impor­tance of Being Earnest was no trou­ble either, and like iBooks was avail­able for free.

The con­tender enters with a new addi­tion – italic stage direc­tions – and excel­lent use of short indents to delimit para­graphs. The left-​​aligned text is wel­come, but lack of hyphen­ation often cre­ates imbal­ance. The page num­ber at the bot­tom seems extra­ne­ous espe­cially because it pro­vides no con­text (page 20 of?).

Google Books could cer­tainly use more com­fort­able and even mar­gins around the text, but it is almost on par with Kindle.

Inter­est­ingly, Google pro­vides the option of see­ing the scanned page. While this isn’t of great value on the iPhone screen (it’s just too small to read), it does give us insight on what a page from a book can really look like.

Here were are intro­duced to a new form of styling: small-​​caps. I urge you to read Alec Julien’s excel­lent col­umn on small caps at I Love Typog­ra­phy as it will explain their sub­tlety and impor­tance. Sim­ply put, small-​​caps are small ver­sions of cap­i­tal let­ters which have been recre­ated to evenly match the weight of their coun­ter­parts. They are often used for acronyms, head­ers, cap­tions and char­ac­ter intro­duc­tions in books and mag­a­zines to keep a con­sis­tent ink den­sity through­out the page (aka color).

Solu­tions

This piece wouldn’t be com­plete with­out a pro­posed solu­tion for Apple, Ama­zon and Google to work from.

Suc­cess­ful eBook typog­ra­phy (much like tra­di­tional book typog­ra­phy) will require the following:

• A prop­erly man­aged type­face with flex­i­ble styling options, includ­ing weights, ital­ics and small-​​caps. In the fol­low­ing exam­ple I use the won­der­ful FF Scala but there are many great choices.
• Left-​​aligned and hyphen­ated text, to avoid rivers and help improve leg­i­bil­ity (see PHP Typog­ra­phy for how to effec­tively imple­ment this on the web). 
• Mar­gins and indents appro­pri­ately scaled to the screen-​​size.
• Econ­omy in graph­i­cal and infor­ma­tional elements.

Maybe not per­fect, but better.

eBooks may never reach the level of typo­graphic finesse that their paper coun­ter­parts did, but I don’t see why they can’t. In fact, I hope eBooks will become works of beauty wor­thy of the ages.

Because most styling can be auto­mated fairly accu­rately – as demon­strated by all three apps – typo­graphic per­fec­tion in eBooks will depend on how care­fully we craft the rules of this automa­tion rather than the anti­quated and painstak­ing process of bal­anc­ing each page by humanly car­ing for each hyphen.

So what are we wait­ing for?