EZG aims to inspire and promote digital book design. Like the CSS Zen Garden, it demonstrates that solely via Cascading Style Sheets (and in our case a cover image), a wide range of expression is possible.

Contributions of new styles aren’t just welcome, they’re strongly encouraged.

While all browser typography needs improvement, these screenshots were taken on a Mac, which provides the best experience right now:

More information on About ePub Zen Garden.

There’s a lot of finger-pointing going on, but my feeling is that it reduces down to two statements:

1. Reading systems need to fully support HTML/CSS. Realistically this means they must be based on WebKit or a similar mature HTML rendering engine. A home-grown engine like Adobe Digital Editions is often a source of frustration for ePub producers and readers.
2. ePub producers need to take responsibility to understand how to correctly mark up their books. The best thing you can do when getting started is minimize your use of styles and custom formatting. Later, bring on an HTML/CSS expert to help fine-tune the layout.

Where I disagree with Mike is the idea that a beautiful ebook needs to precisely mimic its print equivalent. For born-digital works this obviously doesn’t apply at all, and the ability to read an ebook on devices of varying screen sizes and capabilities means that pixel-perfect rendering isn’t even desirable. Anybody with an ereader who’s tried to read PDFs on them is familiar with this problem.

What does need to improve are the defaults. This is where Apple tends to excel, by providing beautiful interfaces out-of-the-box.

But I also recently worked on a project to replace an unmaintainable website that was generated by Apple’s web-building software. It looked great in Safari but was totally unusable for the visually-impaired community, a substantial fraction of the target audience. I’m afraid an Apple ereading solution would be just as much of a beautiful cage.

Luckily, mature web browsers + high-quality HTML + reasonable CSS can produce some lovely results already. Here’s Mike’s test document in Bookworm’s new Reading Mode. I happen to think this looks nice.

But it’s much more important for ebook creators to proof the content rather than the layout. Check that the line breaks are right, that words aren’t run together, and that special characters are displayed properly. (The last Kindle book I purchased had numerous spacing errors — not bad enough to return it, but annoying for something that cost $6.00).

There’s also a guide to how far you are in the current section. It’s based on a percentage rather than an absolute number of pages (similar to the Kindle’s pagination indicator).

Initial code release post.

Update Feb 18: Key controls have now changed
n = next page
p = previous page
j = next chapter
k = previous chapter

Update April 3: IE 7 now supported (and possibly IE 8, haven’t checked).

The Book as Art presents four decades of artists’ books by the medium’s finest female practitioners from around the world. Although inspired by livres d’artiste—deluxe books illustrated with prints by such celebrated artists as Georges Rouault and Pablo Picasso—by the end of the twentieth century artists’ books had moved away from the traditional codex format. Examples on display, often sculptural in form, reveal an innovative interweaving of image and text through the use of a broad range of media, materials, and techniques.

The exhibit will run from February 14 to May 31, 2009.  Full press release.  The McMullen is located on Boston College campus, in Chestnut Hill, MA, just outside of Boston.

Sometimes the issues are minor: occasional spacing errors, missing or overzealous capitalization.  Other times they can be more prevalent.  A friend recently purchased Sarah Vowell’s The Wordy Shipmates from the Kindle store and many of the quotation marks were mangled (it’s likely the wrong encoding was used).

Amazon responded to the customer complaint very quickly, saying that they would notify the publisher and my friend could re-download the corrected book when it was posted. They also gave him a credit for an additional purchase. That’s a good outcome, obviously, but you never have to return a printed book because the punctuation is wrong.

Clearly the quality control needs to be on the publisher end, as each individual bookseller can’t be responsible for checking all of the digital books they offer.  The recent survey conducted at the Frankfurt Book Fair found that 60% of the respondents did not have an ereader, and while I don’t think everyone involved in book publishing actually needs to own one, I’d hope that any group distributing ebooks would be able to review them in the same way that their customers are receiving them.  If you sell Kindle books, someone on your team should have a Kindle and should check at least a representative sample of your offerings, especially if your group is new to digital distribution.

The best thing readers can do to improve ebook quality is to complain.  For now I believe the focus should be on simple fidelity: does this ebook at least contain the same text as the printed version?  Eventually, though, expectations about digital books should rise to the point of considering design. This is especially true when the ePub format is capable of supporting embedded fonts and the same level of aesthetic sophistication that’s present on the web.  Books can be works of art, and ebooks can be beautiful too.