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PW's Panel on Going from Book to e-Book - Publishers Weekly

Posted: 03 Mar 2010 07:41 AM PST

Louisa Ermelino -- Publishers Weekly, 3/3/2010 10:27:38 AM

PW held its second discussion panel in the Think Future series Tuesday morning: From Book to E- Book: Aesthetics, Design and the Digital. The panel included Matteo Bologna, founder and creative director of Mucca Design, a branding agency which has done "many, many book jackets" with clients including Penguin, Rizzoli and HarperCollins.

Bologna belives that the book jacket is the most important marketing tool in selling a book, close on the heels of word of mouth. But, he pointed out, the book as an object of beauty does not apply to e-books. The sense of size, the physical sensation of holding a book, touching it, is gone, so e-books must rely on other means of presenting themselves such as websites where information and content become key, as in the book reviews available on Amazon's pages. His idea that "the industry is waiting, that we are in the moment similar to when radio was confronted with television," was repeated throughout the panel. Bologna's call was for innovation. I-tune covers, he said, still look like album and CD covers, adding that his young daughter, while she knows about Cd's, has never seen one. Book jackets on the web are the same as the book jackets on books. What is essential is to leave the past behind, and Bologna observed, the new generation will have no preconceptions. They might, like his own daughter, know about traditional publishing, but will not have experienced it in the same way as those of us in the industry now experience it.

Charles Nix, partner in the publishing firm Scott & Nix and president of the Type directors Club, followed with a succinct power point presentation breaking books into three catagories: Machine/Meal/Metaphor. Machine refers to reference books: dictionaries, field guides, books that are used until "they break down," become too tattered and worn or else their information is dated or no longer useful. Metaphor is the coffee table book. It works as a metaphor for its owner, reflects its owner's interests. "We go to Nancy's house and on her coffee table is a beautiful book about butterflies and we think, 'Look at this beautiful book about butterflies. Nancy is so interesting and sensitive and likes butterflies.'" It's book as object. And the third, book as Meal is a book that you consume.

Nix then went on to discuss character count in a line as it applies in traditional books. The eye works best with 50-65 characters per line (10 to 11 words). This, he calls "the sweet spot" and is the easiest to read and enjoy and understand. Legal documents can be as dense as 150 characters per line (enough said) whereas newspapers use telegraphic text, presenting thoughts in bursts at a line length of 39 characters or 4 words per line in a column.

So where does this put e-books? The Kindle and Sony e-reader weigh in at 43 characters per line (of course, you can make the font larger which changes this equation) Reading on an i-phone reduces it to 26. The question becomes one of readability vs legibility. You can read all of these, but at what point can you extract information? And where is the pleasure?
Nix's practical suggestion for e-books is to eliminate justified text and to have right margins ragged. Displaying the difference on screen, it was easy to note that justified text results in "bad spacing" which leads to 'bad comprehension."

Andy Hughes, vice president of production and Design at Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, brought the expertise of 30 years of book production to comment that the skills publishing has developed to present content does not easily transfer to a screen. Designers and production editors worked on hard copy together. Now in e-book creation, these two groups are divorced especially since many files are created offshore. The industry is still thinking of print production but must start thinking in digital mode. How do we improve art on a device with a screen? Imbedding art in text is one idea but editors and publishers are not programmed to think this way because e-books are still only 2% of market share. This is a difficult transition but as e-books become a more significant part of the market, skill sets will have to change. In the meantime, print cannot be compromised because it must deliver most of the revenue.

On the plus side, technology has capabilities that could only be dreamed about a few years ago. The challenge is to bring the best of print publishing to the new technology. It's not so simple to convert print to e-book, Hughes claims. "It's totally different." Think of making a book into a website. Preparing a good e-book file, he says, is "like making a gourmet meal out of leftovers." The conclusion? It's an exciting, confusing time of transition.

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Wednesday, March 3, 2010