What’s the difference between an ebook and a print book?
Stupid question, you might think. The difference is obvious, isn’t it?
From where I’m standing as an author, an editor, and a production designer who works with authors on a daily basis, I can tell you the difference must not be that obvious.
It’s not authors’ fault if they don’t understand the real differences. It’s a whole new world out here in the digital business, and after a lot of Googling, I’ve discovered a singular lack of information on the subject.
I’m sorry to say this will only be a primer geared toward readjusting author understanding and expectation. If you’re a publisher who wants to know how to produce better ebooks, take a course in xhtml and get thee to the MobileRead forums. Capisce?
Right, then. Here we go:
Print publication is a spatial process. It’s ruled by physical laws of size, dimension, proportion and location. When a print publisher produces a book, pages are printed on paper, exactly the same way hundreds or thousands of times so they’re all identical.
Digital publication is ruled by ones and zeroes: computer code. Books become files instead of physical objects. Nothing is printed. What digital publishers actually produce are potential pages someone could read on a display device.
Really, the concept of a “page” loses all relevance in ebooks, and this seems to be where many writers’ understanding of the digital publication process breaks down. If you stop to think, does it make sense that a printed page is merely squished down to fit a cellphone screen? Of course not. The font would be tiny and unreadable.
Instead, digital publishers deal with “reflowable text.”
The easiest way to understand reflowable text is to think of your story as a single, very long piece of yarn. The string has a beginning and an end, same as your story. The letters, spaces and punctuation that make up your story come in the same order along your string as they would on a print page.
Crunch your yarn into a ball, tie it in knots, feed it to your cat, but if you were to unravel that string, you’d find everything remains in the same order along the string, no matter what shape it’s in.
Believe it or not, ebook coding works the exact same way.
String of yarn = string of computer code.
Devices that render ebooks display your story string a bit at a time to “fit” the device’s screen size. Only a certain amount fits at one time, depending on the size of the screen. The smaller the screen, the less yarn you can see at one time. The larger the screen, the more yarn you can see at one time. If a user increases their font size, even less of the yarn is visible on the screen at once. If they decrease font size, more of the yarn becomes visible.
If you took that same yarn and fed it into a different ereader device with a different screen size, the same text would “flow” onto the screen, just in differing amounts on the screen at one time; hence the term “reflowable text”.
This is only possible because yarn is flexible and fluid. Our job as digital publishers is to turn your story yarn into strings of computer code.
Pretty simple, that part. The rest isn’t all that much more complicated, really. Computer coding — most commonly xhtml (which is a similar to but slightly different than plain old html) — is embedded in most ebook file types to tell a display device, for instance, that chapter headers need to be rendered bigger than regular story text. Things like a Table of Contents are coded a certain way, as are most user-convenience ebook features.
The trick we have to perform as digital publishers is to make the digital reading experience mimic the print reading experience as much as possible. And here…we hit a wall of misconception.
Myth-Busters Moment: Because computers are involved in digital publishing, absolutely anything is possible. Computers can do anything, right? Even produce a book totally in green comic sans print, full of pretty animated graphics and other frills.
You’re absolutely right. We can do all that and more.
The problem is, no one will be able to read it.
Few digital display devices can currently display color. Only a very small number of fonts are supported, and many ereading devices cannot render graphics at all.
Oops. It’s not what your publisher can do that dictates how ebooks can look, it’s what the gabillion or so display devices — each with their own limitations — are capable of displaying that dictates how well your book can be made to mimic a print book.
[Time out for a reality check -- stylized font, colors and graphics are only cool in anime, comics, children's or non-fiction books. In general fiction, those things actually distract from the story people paid to read. So chill on those expectations. Commercial fiction publishers wouldn't turn your ebook into visual vomit, even if display devices were baby penguins capable of rendering it.]
Now for some more specific ebook limitations:
Page turns. An ebook page-turn doesn’t work the same way as flipping a paper page. Ebook page-turns require a device to read code and render it on the screen, and this does not happen instantly. Screen refresh takes time. Our job as digital publishers is to make ebook code as clean and fluid as possible in order to speed that process. Your job as a writer is to understand that sometimes the editing process involves cleaning that code. Certain text characters are problems for some devices, and those problems can cause refresh to slow down or break down entirely, or cause rendering errors.
These things break reader immersion. Digital authors are obligated to care about immersion problems, whether they want to or not.
Another job we have as digital publishers is to make the largest amount of text possible render on a screen at once to lower the number of page turns. To do this, sometimes we have to streamline how your work is presented visually and mechanically.
For instance, take blank lines. Blank lines, which in print publications can denote any number of things like point of view swaps or scene breaks, are no-nos in ebooks. Many devices will ignore blank lines entirely to maximize the amount of text-per-screen, so you cannot rely on that device to alert the reader something’s about to change. Digital publishers have ways to “force” whitespace, but those methods require more code that could slow page refresh.
Similarly, if a digital editor grinds on you about the twenty billion bunny turds (ellipses) you’ve put in a single paragraph (which stink up screen space that might otherwise be occupied by story), there are more reasons behind the request than there might be when dealing with a print publisher.
Expect to hear and accept “no” for an answer sometimes, because what might be a perfectly reasonable expectation in print won’t always work in ebooks. Be open. Be proactive when you can. Ask questions when you don’t understand something, and be reasonable. When display technology improves as a whole, digital publishers will exploit every single bell and whistle we can reasonably expect to work on all ereader devices in order to enhance the digital reading experience.
Until then, understand limitations exist, and believe me when I say digital publishers are even more impatient than digital authors for the technology to catch up to the what-ifs.
Any questions? Post them in comments and I’ll do my best to answer them as time (and knowledge) allow.
