Book People Archive

Re: Why proofed and formatted digital text?

On Tue, 14 Feb 2006, John Mark Ockerbloom wrote:

>
> Jon Noring quoted Daniel P. B. Smith:
>>> But I'm wondering what exactly you get with proofed conversion to a
>>> text format, that you wouldn't get with a good page image -- assuming
>>> you could use the Xerox reflowable-word-image trick if you liked, and
>>> assuming you could perform searches via a linked, _unproofed_ text
>>> conversion.
>
> We've gone over the relative advantages of book page images vs.
> transcriptions here a number of times.   I think Michael Hart has
> posted a canonical "etexts vs. pictures of books" piece at least
> once before, arguing for the benefits of transcriptions, but I can't
> find the URL right now.

Here is the message I sent:

ebookvsi.gut

eBooks and iBooks


eBooks Are Text while iBooks Are Images

These differences are currently being listed in some of
the following categories.  Feel free to add categories.

***

Local versus Remote Files

Small Files versus Much Larger Files

How Many eBooks versus How Many iBooks?

Your Choices versus Theirs
   Fonts, Margins, Pages, Colors, etc.

***

After nearly 35 years of putting eBooks on the Internet
for free download, there are also now iBooks, which are
quite different in many ways.  Here is a compliled list
of some of these differences, and perhaps you will have
examples or comparisons you would like to add.


Objective versus Subjective

These are facts, as best we have been able to gather.

Subjective opinions will be listed separately with some
identifying marker, such as "Personally, I believe..."


1.  Local Versus Remote

     Large Versus Small Hard Drive Requirements

     Large Versus Small Video Requirements

     Being Dependent On Someone Else To Choose How Books Appear



The first thing many people notice about the difference
between eBooks and iBooks is that most eBooks have been
made available for you to keep locally, while iBooks in
general have been made available only for remote access
at certain sites.

One of the reasons for this is due to a requirement for
much larger hard drives for iBooks than for eBooks.  In
the vast majority of cases eBooks can be stored in less
than 1 megabyte of space, while it takes many times the
space to store iBooks.  Download a few examples to find
out how great this difference is and let us know.

The question becomes whether you want to spend money on
iBooks as local hard drive storage or on high bandwidth
access to remote sites, either way, it costs a lot more
to use iBooks than eBooks; more money, more time and in
many cases more advertizing.

The question of cost to store eBooks is minimal, as you
could download millions of eBooks into one school-sized
notebook full of DVDs at a cost of under $100; try this
with iBooks and let us know your results.

In addition to a big difference in storage requirements
between eBooks and iBooks there is also some difference
in the requirements just to see the books.


Color versus Monochrome

I have been reading eBooks for years on monochrome PDAs
and monitors and thus I didn't understand many messages
complaining about their screen resolution levels simply
because the problem doesn't arise much with monochrome.

Try reading the same screens on a monochrome PDA versus
a color PDA and you will instantly see the difference--
the monochrome characters are unified, no visible dots,
pixels, or other video artifacting you get with colors.

Not only that but non-color PDAs are less expensive and
their batteries usually last longer.

Paper books are usually black and white, so why the big
deal with color images of something black and white?

Is seeing yellowed antique paper or parchment really an
important feature to any but the most scholarly reader?

Personally, I find it much easier to read monochrome.

However, with eBooks you can select any colors you like
for the foreground and background, which brings us to:


Being Dependent On Someone Else To Choose How Books Appear

With eBooks, your own favorite font that you set as the
default will be the font in your eBooks.  If you do are
not familiar with setting these defaults, I recommend a
little time spent on this, as you might find the entire
computer experience much more pleasing if your computer
presents everything in some way you prefer, rather than
in the way some billion dollar corporation prefers.

In addition, you can change the margination, pagination
and a number of other features in many programs to make
the books appear the way you like them personally.

Why depend on someone else to make the choices for you?


Us And Them

This brings us yet another step into this topic, on the
question of "Whose Books Are They?"

eBooks are your books.

iBooks are their books.

It's usually as simple as that.

You can make eBooks appear any way you like, including,
if you like, making a brand new edition that this world
has never seen before.

This would be difficult to the point of impossible with
iBooks.

Not only can you change the fonts, colors, margination,
and all those other variables, but correcting any error
you find takes only a second when you are reading eBook
files in your favorite word processor.  Try how long it
takes to get an error corrected in iBooks, or even in a
lot of eBooks from other sources, and let us know.

Being dependent on remote storage introduces delays and
other problems that simply aren't there when your books
are your own.

What happens when servers or gateways are slow or down?

What happens when the information provider stops giving
out the information you are relying on?

What happens when the information provider makes choice
after choice that you don't agree with?



Individual Versus Corporation

Accessing Your File Or Theirs

Error Correction




size bandwidth storage time money

local storage versus remote remote storage

dependent on us versus dependent on them
dependent on billion dollar corporations or individuals
fonts, margination, pagination, hyphenation, colors, etc.

error correction

new editions