The other day I told you, with no small amount of excitement, about yesterday’s release of Allen Ginsberg’s Collected Poems in e-book format. Being the dutiful poetry lover I am, and in need of a way to re-read Ginsberg without having to drag around my massive print copy of the Collected, I bought it. Much to my dismay (but, sadly, not to my surprise, given that so much poetry is wrongly formatted when it goes digital), the liniation of the poems in the book was all messed up. The above, a screen shot of the first page of “Howl” in the e-b00k, is not the real first page of “Howl.” This is:
Even from a distance you can see the difference. Ginsberg broke his poem into what he called “strophes,” those long lines that hark back to Whitman. The indentations you see above are meant to indicate that the line keeps going beyond the end of the page, until the next left-justified line. Ginsberg was careful in his liniation, and part of the poem’s impact is in seeing that “who” sticking out again and again on the left side of the page. The digital version pays no mind to this whatsoever. What we get is not the poem itself, but a kind of poor transcription of it.
So here’s my big question–and this is a serious question that I address to someone who knows about these things: is it so hard to code the e-b00k to create those indentations? Doesn’t a trade publisher as big as HarperCollins have the money to pay a professional to do a bit of extra work on an e-book for a figure as big as Ginsberg, especially when there’s a movie about him in theaters now? What’s going on?
E-book will be huge for poetry, as soon as we can solve this problem in a way that indie publishers can take advantage of. So what’s it going to take?
I haven’t read any of the other comments, so forgive me if I reiterate.
It is not hard at all to create the indents, but it is nearly impossible to keep ereaders from breaking the first line at the end if it extends beyond the page. Still, it can be done somewhat consistently with a little ingenuity. And a better job could have been done in this case without the slightest ingenuity.
The problem is that the publishing houses believe they can sell this crap and their readers will be happy. They may indeed sell it, but every ebook that looks like this makes it all the harder to sell the next one.
Furthermore, any ebook–be it the complete Shakespeare or the complete Twilight series–is a complete joke at close to $20. In my opinion (and I’m in the publishing business), no ebook should cost more than $10. After all, the publisher pays for the initial setup and the marketing but nearly nothing for an infinite amount of copies. If the book has already been published, the costs are minimal. Readers realize this and won’t (or at least shouldn’t) put up with it for long. My guess is that this version was sent to a conversion house and took half a day to produce. I would bet that the publisher didn’t even pay or take the time to proof or edit it. So we’re left with a piece of art that’s become a digital turd. Then we, like idiots, pay for it in the hopes that the original was left unmolested.
A couple of major players have put out some nice ebooks (Vintage forges some of the best to my eye). But most simply don’t care about the work when it comes to the bottom line. It’s a shame because there isn’t a much easier bottom line to meet, and things like this are dismaying a lot of readers in the midst of a very marketable publishing boom. Poetry may not be the easiest thing to digitally reproduce…but shame on them for not even trying.
I did a book of poetry for my first ebook conversion. (Tofu Quilt, by Ching Yeung Russell, Lee and Low Books). While the poetry doesn’t use reverse indents (There is secondary paragraph spacing between stanzas) the Glossary DOES use reverse indents.
It was tricky to find the CSS code, and mobilereads forum was a big help. The glossary indents work in every situation we were able to test.
Poetry definitely takes more time and care to convert than prose. But John Adams said “You’re never alone with a poet in your pocket.”
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Natasha,
You are completely right that at the extreme font sizes the formatting will break. Sadly, there is not much anyone can do about that in the formatting itself, especially on the Kindle. Print books still do have their usefulness, especially on complex content that really needs page layout fidelity.
Joshua
Ugh. I just downloaded a sample of the HarperCollins’ Ginsberg collection for Kindle. It just plain sucks. It looks as if some attempt has been made to reproduce the original’s indentations, line breaks, and the like, but in “Vision 1948″ at least, the job’s been completely botched. It’s wrong in every font size.
And HarperCollins is asking $18.99 for this!