ePub Zen Garden aims to keep your E-books from looking atrocious
June 8, 2009 11:16 AM   Subscribe

Do your E-books look atrocious? They don’t have to. Liza Daly’s new ePub Zen Garden project does for electronic books what CSS Zen Garden did for the Web – demonstrate that typography and layout of E-books are easily altered and, quite possibly, beautiful and usable.

(The ePub E-book format is, in fact, XHTML 1.1 + CSS, so the techniques underlying the ePub and CSS Zen Gardens are almost identical.)
posted by joeclark (16 comments total) 30 users marked this as a favorite
 
Way cool. See also,

Kindle Formatting for Web Geeks

First link supposed to go here?
posted by cjorgensen at 11:24 AM on June 8, 2009 [1 favorite]


I found Springtime and Swiss readable but gads, are Noir and Wallpaper really good examples of electronic type style?
posted by Toekneesan at 11:33 AM on June 8, 2009


I liked Noir the best. And while readable, I found Swiss to be ugly and boring, and I didn't mind Wallpaper either.

But I am so not a designer.
posted by cjorgensen at 11:39 AM on June 8, 2009


Sounds good. I've heard some bad stories about eBooks being seen as the place content goes to die, and just having text shovelled on to them.
posted by Artw at 11:42 AM on June 8, 2009


Swiss seems too heavy and dense for reading online for an extended period of time, if how it looks in a browser is how it looks on a kindle.
posted by fuzzypantalones at 11:46 AM on June 8, 2009


Um, yes, cjorgensen. Typo.
posted by joeclark at 11:48 AM on June 8, 2009


I'm the creator. These aren't meant to be best practices or even necessarily to anyone's taste. I asked four designers to contribute (I'm an engineer) and this is the result.

The audience for the project are publishers who thus far have only dealt with limited formats like Mobipocket. Many publishers are totally unaware of CSS, don't understand that ePub is very much HTML, and don't realize they can pressure e-reader manufacturers to improve support for style and typography.

Like the original CSS Zen Garden, I strongly encourage designers and type geeks to submit new styles for inclusion.
posted by nev at 11:58 AM on June 8, 2009 [4 favorites]


(The ePub E-book format is, in fact, XHTML 1.1 + CSS, so the techniques underlying the ePub and CSS Zen Gardens are almost identically broken.)
posted by 3.2.3 at 12:05 PM on June 8, 2009 [2 favorites]


Oh, I wouldn’t go that far, Three-dot-Two-dot-Three. You were hoping for CSS3 columns module?
posted by joeclark at 12:16 PM on June 8, 2009


For ebooks, 99% of the format is the font choice.
posted by smackfu at 12:26 PM on June 8, 2009


Thanks for taking the time to comment, nev.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 12:35 PM on June 8, 2009


For ebooks, 99% of the format is the font choice.

That's pretty much true about any book, electronic or paper. Typography, as it applies to a book, should not draw attention to itself. Rather, it should compliment and assist the flow of the text.
posted by Thorzdad at 12:51 PM on June 8, 2009


And 99% of the other 1% is text-align and line-height. Just as in printed books.
posted by joeclark at 12:51 PM on June 8, 2009


If good CSS is the key, I'm curious as to why they use px -sized text instead of -em sized.
posted by asfuller at 3:42 PM on June 8, 2009


Eucalyptus for iPhone uses proper fonts, proper justified layouts and proper typography (hyphenation!) and includes Project Gutenburg (sp?) as an app store of sorts.

I can't wait to get to work so I can check this project out.
posted by Talez at 4:54 PM on June 8, 2009


I like the site, but I think my favorite thing about it is that it uses Middlemarch as the sample text and the whole thing appears to be there to read! Way better than a Project Gutenberg text file. God I love the internet.
posted by anotherpanacea at 6:30 PM on June 8, 2009 [1 favorite]


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