Dead Ink Vinyl

On the eve of Amazon’s announcement that was entering the ebook reader market with its Kindle device, I wrote an overly long article examining the reasons why I felt the concept of reading books on an ebook reader wouldn’t gain broad acceptance. During that discussion, I made the assumption that most digital books are either little more than raw text and images (I’m including HTML here) or were PDFs of the print edition.

The “raw text and images” approach is fine for shorter content—blogs, newspaper articles, and the like—but I’ve found that for longer content, real attention to typography and page layout is needed to make the experience enjoyable for me. (This is also why the current implementation of O’Reilly’s Safari service doesn’t work for me.) However, it never occurred to me that PDFs could be made specially for the ebook reader screen—complete with appropriately sized text and all of the traditional design touches normally reserved for print. Now I’ve learned that Rosenfeld Media’s PDF edition of Indi Young’s book Mental Models is designed to be read on the 4×6 screen found on many popular ebook readers. From the screenshot provided in Jorge Arango’s article, I have to admit: that looks like an ebook I would be happy to curl up with for hours.

In hindsight, it’s really obvious that publishers could design PDF ebooks specifically for consumption on ebook readers. In fact, it’s so obvious that I believe PDF books designed primarily for viewing on an ebook reader is the future of digital publishing¹. It certainly is a prerequisite for me to embrace reading books on a digital device.

¹ The technical implementation doesn’t have to be PDF. Any format that tightly defines the typography and layout of pages will work.