Monday, March 12, 2012

Of e-readers

I have a guilty secret. I have an e-reader—no, not really. I have two of them!

Yep. I have a Kindle™ and a Nook™ on my desk. And, I use them—regularly. Last week, I had a Kindle Fire™, too. And, we have an iPod™ and access to an iPad™, as well.

What in world am I doing with all those e-readers? Testing, of course. I know far more about the displaying of Hebrew on e-readers than I want to. And, I can tell you how PDFs look on them, too.

Wanna know more? I thought so. Let's start with PDFs, that old standby format that we all use and have a love/hate relationship with.

A PDF displays on all of them. But, it does best on a Nook™. It reflows, you can change the font size, non-pointed Hebrew shows up perfectly, all the funky transliterations, such as š show up correctly, too. But, pointed Hebrew doesn't do as well. Sometimes it shows up perfectly; other times, you get a character or two on a line, then some blank lines and a few more characters. Strange...

What about the Kindle™ with PDFs? Not so good. It just allows a page view. You can re-size it, but, it doesn't re-flow. You have to use the buttons to move the screen. Talk about a pain!

But, you didn't buy an e-reader to read PDFs, did you? I didn't think so. So, how does our Hebrew fare on the Nook™? It doesn't. Period. It doesn't show up; it doesn't even leave funky squares to let you know it's missing. Frustrating!

The Kindle™ fares a bit better. The Hebrew font displays fine; the character size is correct and readable. One problem, though. It's backwards. Yep. It goes left-to-right! So, I thought maybe that was a function of the stripped down operating system in the Kindle™, so I borrowed a Kindle Fire™, which is Android™ powered, thinking it would do better...Nope. Still backwards...

So, what's a scholar to do? Well, enter the iOS devices. We dumped one of our books onto an iPad™. Sure enough. It was all there—and right-to-left even!

So, how is it that some books with Hebrew are showing up in Kindles™ and Nooks™? Well, it's easy—sorta. You take the file and turn all the Hebrew into a graphic. But, there are several problems with that: 1. It doesn't scale well when you change the font. 2. It isn't searchable! 3. It takes extra labor and therefore costs more.

So, don't be looking for a huge flood of academic books into the e-book market anytime soon...

By the way, most of the cost of a book is in the editorial and prepress (typesetting) process. The physical books are a small part of it—at least if you still edit your books, which Eisenbrauns does. Not sure about some other publishers.

I was reading a book this weekend and came across a sentence that used "then" where they clearly meant "than." Ouch! This was an academic book, too...

5 comments:

tim bulkeley said...

Frustrating isn't it? One would think that with the importance of Arabic the RTL problem would be a higher priority.

If iPads have it though it is surely not a long wait, though I wonder if consumer reluctance among the humanities may prove a more enduring barrier till the 50-somethings are retiring?

tim bulkeley said...

Frustrating isn't it? One would think that with the importance of Arabic the RTL problem would be a higher priority.

If iPads have it though it is surely not a long wait, though I wonder if consumer reluctance among the humanities may prove a more enduring barrier till the 50-somethings are retiring?

That's my 2 cents! said...

I read more with my Kindle than I ever read books. I have an app for my smart phone which allows me to download the content on my Kindle to my phone. Now, when I'm out and about, or waiting on mom at the Dr.'s, or whatever, I simply pull my phone out and read. It probably takes me longer to read a book, but I'm also reading more than one book at a time. I may go to a tablet like an iPad, but what I have is more than sufficient, so I don't see a need to spend anymore on new "stuff".

jps said...

Tim, Very frustrating—especially for the publisher!

Lonnie, but you're not reading stuff with Hebrew in it : )

James

That's my 2 cents! said...

No, mores the pity. But even if my Kindle supported Hebrew, t'would be wasted on me. For, alas and alack, I cannot read Hebrew. It's all Greek to me! :-P