Re: Would like your feedback on free ePub edition of 'My Antonia'

Paulo Ney de Souza wrote:
> Jon Noring wrote:

>> I've produced a "beta" ePub edition of Willa Cather's "My Antonia",
>> and would like any and all feedback on it (please send your
>> feedback by private email to [email protected] ) ...
>>
>> You may download the latest version from:
>>
>>    http://www.glasspublishing.net/myantonia/

> My two cents:

Paulo, thanks for your critical feedback! Here are my comments
below. I do see where we have a few disagreements regarding
typography vis-a-vis the original paper book, so where I disagree
with your comments is nothing personal.


>  - The file is crashing Stanza on the iPhone, about half of the
>    time.

Hmmm, is this usual with epubs on Stanza, or is it peculiar to my
edition? Anyone else?

My epub is fully conforming to the specs, but it is certainly
possible I am doing something which the Stanza developers did not
foresee. I'll try to contact them and see if they can diagnose the
problem. If the tweaks to the epub to make it reliably readable on
Stanza are small and do not adversely affect the rendering on
Adobe DE and Firefox-epubreader, I'll make the tweaks.


>  - Footnotes could be better handled, right now there is a footnote
>    that has been give a page "Author's Note" but no-one has any idea
>    where it is coming from, and specifically there is no link  in
>    the real place - first page of the Book I.

True. Notes handling in e-books is one of the eternal problem areas
since most reflowable reading systems "punt" on them, and provide no
special facility for presentation (the best system is Microsoft Reader
LIT 'pagelet' feature, which very few people are aware of.) ePub is
among those formats that does not have a special "notes" facility so
it is impossible to present notes as footnotes if the publisher and/or
reader desires it. So the note has to be moved to its own page and
linked to it from elsewhere by note reference (for most books, placing
notes inline at the point of reference is not wanted as that is
jarring to the reading experience.)

Regarding the note itself, there is only one note in the whole book,
and in this case the note reference is to the first occurence of
the word "Antonia" in Chapter 1 of Book I, although that word was
used in the Introduction several times without note reference. Thus,
where the note reference is placed is irrelevant to the flow of the
content (this is an editor/publisher decision) and the note has
more impact placed where it is than it would be buried somewhere in
the back.

So the issue is whether I should place a note reference on the first
use of the word "Antonia" in Book I -- Chapter 1 so as to maintain
some sort of continuity with the original paper book.

I made the philosophical decision that this edition is a modern
reader, and not an attempt to duplicate the typography and layout
of the original book. Since the original page scans are linked from
the book, the interested reader can see the original typography and
layout in its full glory, so they get the best of both worlds.

Furthermore, since the note is "general" to the book, and has
nothing to do with the particular "Antonia", then there is no need
to preserve "history".

With that said, I will add a comment to the Author's Note saying
where the original note reference was made, but will not add the
note reference to where it originally occured since, in my opinion,
doing so actually impinges on the ludic flow of this reading
edition. I am a strong believer in not getting in the way of the
reading experience, and note reference markers do that, so where
note reference markers are not needed, then I don't use them.

I do understand that several here will disagree with my decision,
but I then note that they are free to issue their own edition if
they so choose and do what they want with the single (and general)
note.


>  - The original book has text justification on the right which has
>    been lost in this edition

Right text justification is trivially easy for me to add in CSS, but
I am reluctant to do this since for epub reading systems that
implement CSS right text justification, I've not been happy with the
results, especially when the end-user makes the text larger.

And the comment that the original book had right text justification
as the reason I must do it in my edition is again an attempt to
make my epub typographically emulate the original, which is not
necessary (and most paper books of that era until today do this, so
the right text justification of the original paper book is nothing
special to "My Antonia".)

If I go the direction of trying to emulate the original typography,
then do I need to embed a font which looks like the original font?,
and should I break each line exactly as found in the original? and
break every hyphenated word as it was in the original?, etc., etc.
Where does one stop? My edition is a "modern reader" edition to
present the *textual content* of the book, not to be a facsimile copy
of the original to showcase the typographical arts (again, the page
scans are available for those who want to see the original layout.)

The question to ask those reading this: when you read an ePub, do
you prefer the right text to be justified or not? And what ePub
reading system(s) are you using?

(As an aside, I hope that epub reading systems will allow the
end-user to select text-justification, among other typographic
settings. I am all for letting the reader tweak typography.)


>  - The beginning of each Book, in the original edition is in Small
>    Caps and you have shows up in fake small caps in Stanza (when it
>    opens), same in EPubReader and nothing on Adobe DE.

If I were to implement small caps the best way, I'd find a font which
is designed for low-rez screen reading and which includes special
small caps glyphs. The odds of finding such a font are quite low,
plus we have to deal with the fact that most epub reading systems will
ignore the embedded font anyway.

So small caps, if desired, have to be implemented using CSS so reading
systems that recognize CSS small-caps will synthetically re-create
them. This is what I did in my ePub to enable small caps:

*****

<p><span class="smallcaps">Soon</span> after I got home that summer...

and in CSS:

span.smallcaps {font-variant: small-caps;}

*****

Note that Adobe DE does not support CSS 'small-caps', so the above
markup is simply ignored. And since there is no other standard way to
do small caps for Adobe DE other than font embedding (covered above),
I just have to accept that small caps won't appear in Adobe DE. I am
happy with how small-caps appear in Firefox, though.

Regarding Stanza, if the small caps are really, really funky bad
looking, then I will reconsider whether I even implement small caps
(as an aside, it is interesting that Stanza attempts small caps, while
Adobe DE does not.)

(Can someone here provide me with a screen capture from the iPhone
Stanza showing what small caps look like?)

And of course, some would say my attempt with small-caps is a nod to
the original typography, which earlier I said I was little interested
in preserving in my reader edition. However, I like small caps used
this way, so I implement them not because the original did, but
because it adds a nice touch, so long as it is properly presented on
the reading system, which is an orthogonal issue.


Thanks again, Paulo!

Jon Noring




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