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

Paulo Ney de Souza wrote:

> I only commented because I read somewhere, I guess in the Intro,
> that the Edition was suitable for scholarly research!

Well, I was somewhat vague in the Preface section, and did say "many
uses". I implied, and obviously not very well, that this reader
edition is suitable for *some* scholarly research.

Later in the Preface I offered to give, on request, an extended XHTML
1.1 document which includes markup for all the known errors and
corrections, plus exact page/line/word breaks. I am thinking of saying
that a "Digital Scholars Edition" ePub may be produced in the future,
which includes a lot more original book information (such as page
break milepost markers) than the Readers Edition gives. Jose Menendez'
online version does include more of that information so is actually
closer to a true scholarly edition where ludic reading is secondary
(his version is actually a good balance between readability and
information of interest to the scholar.)

My approach to digitizing texts is the "master"/"derivative"
approach, where the "master" itself may not be renderable per se,
but from which can be derived anything we want.


> The standards of what a god book is - which has been evolving for 
> millennia now - has been assaulted by the advent of typewriters, 
> high-cost of quality production, computers and self-publishing
> software and continue to this day with ePub rendering that:
> 
>    - like Adobe DE - does not support SC

Actually ePub supports all CSS 2.1, which includes specifying
small-caps (I assume SC means small-caps?). It is Adobe DE which does
not recognize CSS small-caps for some inexplicable reason. My edition
of "My Antonia" has the markup and CSS for small-caps included, which
one can see when reading the ePub in the Epubreader Firefox add-on.
Yes, the small-caps are synthetically produced, but still pretty nice
looking.


>    - like Stanza - with horrible line breaks under right-margin 
> justification

The problem with mobile device readers is the need to filter the rich
formatting possible in ePub (because of CSS 2.1 and richer markup) for
viewing on limited screens. My observation is that Stanza has a ways
to go to fine-tune the filtering, and I'm not sure if Lexcycle will
commit much resources to fine tuning since it was acquired by Amazon
which currently is pushing the Kindle format.


> and even IDPF that puts out standards that do not address footnotes
> or, for example, MathML.... and worst of all - it seems that none of
> us are outraged!

Since I am one of the main technical contributors to the OPS/OPF/OCF
specs since 1999, I can say that the specs are mostly "prepped" for
inclusion of MathML. Right now MathML is not "blessed", but can be
included in content documents using the mechanism given in the OPS
spec.

I actually pushed for "blessing" MathML, but there were reasons not
to yet bless it as a supported vocabulary. One can convert MathML
to SVG and include that natively in ePub since SVG is blessed, but
I am not familiar with how well that works.

(Hmmm, one can certainly include TeX as well...)

Regarding text annotations, that is a difficult feature to specially
address and support in OPS since OPS currently only supports XHTML and
CSS, and that paradigm (which has its roots back in the early days of
HTML) does not have special annotation capability (e.g., there is no
<note> tag in HTML with special requirements for browsers to handle.)

I'd like to see something done, though.

Interestingly, observe how annotations can be rendered in digital
presentation in a way that, in my opinion, is better than the
footnote paradigm used in print (which is a limitation of
ink-on-paper, not a feature.)

Microsoft Reader LIT uses the OEBPS "out-of-spine" construct (which
still exists in ePub but is pretty buried and is currently not
supported by any ePub reader). This feature is called a 'pagelet'. For
one of my e-books with a lot of notes, I place them into a pagelet.
(Paulo, I'll be happy to send you my Kama Sutra LIT e-book where
pagelets are used to display notes in a way superior to anything that
can be done with ink-on-paper.)


> Imagine that it took us (humanity) 50 years to bring back margin-
> kerning back into book production after the sunset of the Linotypes,
> and that software houses like Microsoft (Word) and Adobe (In Design)
> are only now making the first steps in that direction. For a real
> eBook platform with the best line-breaking algorithms, character
> protusion, margin-kerning, support for SC (and any other fort you
> choose) take a look at TeX in this lecture by Kaveh Bazargan where
> he demonstrate it running on an iPhone:
> 
>       http://river-valley.tv/tex-as-an-ebook-reader/

Thanks! I'm listening to it now and it is interesting. He does
cover a lot of the issues in digital visual presentation of textual
content.

Jon Noring




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