{reading and writing in} The Age of Sand

As much as I love e-books, I wish publishers put more thought and effort into the design issues specific to them. From what I understand, most e-books published today come out of the same process as the print edition (something like, perhaps, Adobe InDesign) then exported into EPUB or MOBI (happy to hear from anyone who can clarify this).

As a web designer/developer (there are many similarities between front-end web code and e-books), I’ve never trusted the export function of any application. They tend to spit out extraneous code and open up vast possibilities for errors.

Notably, when the Virginia Quarterly Review published an EPUB version of their book-like journal earlier this year, they took pains on the journal’s EPUB design, going so far as to “optimize” it for Apple’s iBook application. The results showed.

It’s time publishers took a hard look at their workflow. Below are some examples. The first is a scan of a poem in Allen Ginsberg’s Collected Poems 1947 – 1997. The e-book version was released today. I downloaded samples from three vendors/apps for the iPad: Apple’s iBook, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, and Amazon’s Kindle. I looked on Kobo but the book didn’t appear in their store.

This is the print edition, scanned. Note the structure of the lines.

 

Below is the Amazon Kindle edition. Text-size, color and pagination on all of these examples are variable, so should not be a final criteria. Note that the first line of every stanza is indented (this is on every poem, none of which are indented in the print edition). Also note that the line beginnings are completely different than the print edition.

Here is the Nook edition with the same problem with line beginnings:

And again with Apple’s iBook version:

Though the poem is readable, nothing can be taken for granted in a poet’s intent. Poetry e-books also suffer from the problem of variability of font sizes. I did a similar exercise with Jorie Graham’s Sea Change, which has long lines. Generally speaking, I’ve found line breaks to be okay, but making the font larger creates artificial line breaks and the degree of indentation is all over the board.

In an inteview with American Public Media, former U.S. poet Laureate Billy Collins maintains that electronic reading devices (by which I think he means EPUB readers, generally) aren’t well suited to poetry*:

Radke: How did you find the meaning of your poetry changed on the screen?

Collins: Well it wasn’t so much the meaning, it was just that poetry comes in lines, like gaslone comes in gallons. If you wanted the name of the creature that is the poet, they are like homolinearium — they’re like line-making creatures.

Radke: Haha, yes.

Collins:And that’s what we do, we make lines. Charles Olson, the poet, said no line must sleep, every line in a poem should be wakeful to the lines around it. And when you put a poem on a Kindle, the lines are broken in order to fit on the screen. And so instead of being the poet’s decision, it becomes the device’s decision.

I’m not sure if there’s a solution to font-size problem, and I hope that we don’t come to accept lower standards for the sake of e-books. Will we be stuck with PDFs for poetry, or apps only?

*thanks to Alizah at the Poetry Foundation for the heads up on the Collins interview.