Comment by hej | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hej | Hacker News Reader

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You seem to have seriously misunderstood what great presentation is and you are selling books way short. Good presentation is only about rounded corners if those rounded corners are actually an improvement. If they distract they are bad presentation.

There are good and bad ways to present text in books and this is not some subtle improvement, this is noticeable. Typesetting books is seriously hard and there are tons of pitfalls, even if all you need are paragraphs and chapter headings. To make this short, here are all things books can do and the web cannot (yet or in most browsers) do: Complete control over the font. A lot of microtypography. Complete control over justification. Easily creating and maintaining a rhythm.

I'm sure there are a lot more. (Those points are also the reason why typography in ebooks still sucks for the most part, some of that is caused by the ineptness of those who create those books.)

Anyone who has ever had the book of someone with no design background in their hands will be able to testify that there is a huge difference between books done by a professional typesetter and an amateur (if that amateur isn't self-taught and doesn't otherwise care about design).

> Anyone who has ever had the book of someone with no design background in their hands will be able to testify that there is a huge difference between books done by a professional typesetter and an amateur (if that amateur isn't self-taught and doesn't otherwise care about design).

I've read books double spaced with monospaced fonts on shitty LCD monitors - I was able to ignore the terrible presentation because the content was amazing. I've read books where there was a lot of attention paid to design. The paper was nice, the font was carefully chosen, the drop caps were just right, the chapter bullets were spot on, and the cover art was exquisite. The content was awful. The great design did not make me think I'd spent the money well. The great design did not make me rate the book higher on Amazon.

I never recommend a book because of the nice typeface, or the lack of rivers. I only ever recommend a book because of the plotting or characters or writing.

I have not said (but some people seem to think I have) that design is a pointless waste of time. I have said that given the choice between great content or great presentation that I'd much rather have great content.

These are all visual examples. I want to try and avoid analogy (because I usually pick poor choices) but the same is sometimes true for sound. Some early Beatles[1] records are, technically, decidedly sub-optimal compared to today's technology. But that's okay, because they're still amazing. Some awful dull band recorded with 128 track and a bunch of processing and a great engineer is still going to be bad and bland because, well, just because.

[1] I say Beatles but better examples would be all the music on Trojan records, which are pretty lo-fi. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3AbgBOcYHg&feature=fvwre...)

I don't really get you then. You seem to claim that design is important but at the same time deny it.

I do not want to live in a world where the current state of thwart CSS defines what is possible. That is an awful world. The earlier we can flee it the better. I do not want to live in a world where good presentation is not possible.

What? It's really simple. The most important thing, to me, is excellent content. Good design will help excellent content, but excellent content is still great even if it has poor design.

Great design does not help shoddy content.

If an aspiring author asks me for advice do I tell them to work on the plotting and characters? Or do I suggest some bike-shedding around nice fonts and paragraph indentation styles?

Uhm, as a rule, authors should do none of those things. (I will make an exception for Douglas R. Hofstadter. If you want a book where presentation is interwoven with content and you can't really separate one from the other you have to read Gödel Escher Bach. In general, though, it’s safe to say that most authors are not Douglas R. Hofstadter. Gödel Escher Bach is also one of those books that’s hard to make into an ebook – and hasn’t been for that reason – because web technologies are lagging behind the printed book so badly.) They need experts to do that.

I’m not suggesting that authors start bikeshedding. I want professionals to do their profession. Authors are rarely good designers.

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