Do ebooks do poetry any favours?
Guest post by Jill Jones
February 15
I've had an ongoing interest in all the discussion around e-book readers for some years now. For obvious reasons. And I'm not sure all the current flurry about the new Apple tablet and the like will be a big advance.
In other words, I've never been convinced by the slight clunkiness of e-book readers and still am not (quite), though I relented late last year and bought one. No, not a Kindle. I didn't like the idea of that enforced connectivity nor do I have endless cash to pay for it. I bought a decent little device, the Ecoreader, that works offline with all the main formats, including pdf and text files.
Mainly, I wanted something that I could use to read poetry books and manuscripts, my own for checking, and works by others. Also for the endless document files I have hanging about. Something lighter and more compact than a computer, that used epaper, that in fact saved endless printing but might also offer some pleasures of reading in a different way.
But what actually happened? I ended up using it to take on my holiday to read old books (meaning free, legal works in the public domain) partly because the price of etexts still seems too high, but mainly because I just wanted to give it a whirl as cheaply and quickly as possible. That included getting hold of a whack of poetry including Emily D, GM Hopkins, HD, Bill S, TS, WB, DHL, etc etc.
And I found a big problem which I wonder if others have overcome. Reading prose works was mostly no problem. There was the odd bit of formatting glitch but it was bearable and the reading experience was something I got used to. But, try as I might, with the various formats, I found that the poetry was either wrongly or oddly formatted as is, and if I tried to enlarge the text (OK, my eyes ain't as good as they used to be) the formatting would go skewiff at best, and beresque at worst - in other words, did not handle line breaks, indents and stanza breaks.
One solution with my own manuscript, which I was actually in the process of finalising, was to format it in a large font size then pdf it. But that really doesn't do the trick. There's a point past which you really cannot go. My screen size is that of a normal kind of book, it's not teeny tiny.
So, I am wondering if anyone has given this issue some thought and has some practical advice. Meanwhile, I will keep pressing on with my library of classic texts, which has been nice anyway.
Cross-posted from Ruby Street
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Comments
15 Feb 10 at 7:35
What format were you reading the poetry in?
Where were you downloading it from?
Which poetry books?
Also, what would your ideal etext price be? Bearing in mind that printing is at most 20% of the cost of creating a book.
...15 Feb 10 at 11:14
I was using various formats but mainly epub, mobi and pdf. All had problems in holding the formatting, and even when not enlarged, there was some odd formatting for the poems.
I downloaded from various sites, mainly those providing free public domain extexts, as I noted above, by the poets, and others, as I noted above. Including from my British publisher, Salt, who provides free extracts from new poetry titles. He is currently experimenting with epub, I believe, so I will keep an eye on any developments. The files I downloaded from the Salt site were pdfs.
I also uploaded copies of my own manuscript to the e-rear, as I mentioned, as I wanted to check it whilst on holiday as I was in the midst of proof-reading. I used a pdf file which I tried to modify by converting using a much larger font than normal to obviate the problem. But there's a point when this gets ridiculous, as I noted above. (And to say, I didn't just buy this device to read 'books' as such but other texts, including poetry, such as my own or that of others which I may be proofing, marking etc, etc.)
I was reading on another site of a poet and publisher who has come across the same issues: http://angelicpoker.blogspot.com/2010/01/profiting-off-poemsby-changing-poems.html One suggestion is that poets change the way they indicate line breaks. OK, even if we did, there's still books and books of classic and contemporary poetry that is lineated in the usual manner.
I don't yet have an ideal etext price in mind as these experiences have made me a little wary of paying any price for texts that go skewiff - so, until this one is solved, I'll stick to paying for poetry on paper. Besides, as is the case with paper-based books, there's no one ideal price. Obviously, there is a cost to formatting and/or creating texts for digital publishing as well. It's not merely a case of pressing a button, at least not at present.
...17 Feb 10 at 6:21
Hi Jill,
I got a Kindle for Christmas and have been having the same problems! I immediately thought it would be useful for taking poetry to readings, but have now pretty much given up on getting the formatting to work.
pdf produces the best results, I find, in that what you see is what you get. But the Kindle has no zoom function and automatically sets the size so that the text appears in different sizes on different pages, depending on how much white space it excludes.
All the mobi converters I've tried are hopeless - introducing all manner of dodgy, bizarre formatting in a seemingly random fashion.
And of course, you can forget shape poetry!
...17 Feb 10 at 9:18
Hi Jon,
I also saw your comment on the discussion over at Chris Hamilton Emery's facebook page (C H-E being the publisher at Salt).
His answer to the line break issue is this:
The key is not to use "
" a break and to use a paragraph with a class that identifies it as
a line. The use the CSS to remove padding from the para and specify
a hanging indent, turning lines over by 1 or 2 ems. As it reflows
it indents turnovers quite effectively.
Which may do it for line breaks but, yes, anything more complex, well, we dunno yet. Also, what of different fonts within the same poem. E-readers aren't great with fonts. Or mine isn't. Too much mucking about.
I found that as soon as you zoom on pdfs, which my reader can do, they break up the same as mobi or epub.
The discussion re the Salt experiment with epub, if anyone is interested, is here: http://www.facebook.com/notes/chris-hamilton-emery/an-ebook-only-publishing-strand-at-salt/335946096203
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