Sarge Posted November 1, 2012 Share Posted November 1, 2012 No, layouts inside books can differ a fair bit. You need to choose fonts, make each line the same length, decide on chapter title designs and where to put them etc. It's stuff that is usually automated, and then the layout people have to go in and spend days fixing all the problems the automatic process caused. What used to be a common one is where the computer has made each line the same length by adjusting the letter spacing by a tiny amout, but then decides to put just three words on a line with massive spaces between the letters.And this is only for printed books, not ebooks. With ebooks, the reader decides what s/he wants for format, size, font and then it's done by the reader. Of course we loose in quality and we can have problems like the rivers, but we gain more by being able to adjust things ourselves.Covers and chapter title design are unambiguously useless with ebooks. They were only useful for the marketing of printed books, when we had actual books in our hands before deciding to buy them.All of these are things that should disappear and lower the price of ebooks. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Werthead Posted November 1, 2012 Share Posted November 1, 2012 Covers and chapter title design are unambiguously useless with ebooks. They were only useful for the marketing of printed books, when we had actual books in our hands before deciding to buy them.Not cover art. You still need to market and advertise your book and you still need some kind of visual image to do that. People also seem to enjoy putting up visual bookshelves with their virtual covers on display on them. Without that you'd have a simple, boring list. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TrackerNeil Posted November 2, 2012 Share Posted November 2, 2012 There is no DRM there, you're completely missing the point. The law forbids all the copies, for both digital or printed works, unless authorization is given in the license. That's just the law, nothing related to DRM here.DRM are features that make devices voluntarily defective to prevent the copies. They make the copies impossible even when a copy would be legal.Yes, I understand what DRM is; I was using the term loosely.RE: cover art. I think Wert is right that it matters, but I could not say how much, at least to readers. Personally, I can't imagine publishing a book without a good cover illustration, and in fact working with the artist on the cover for my book was one of the best parts of the process. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Maia Posted January 4, 2013 Share Posted January 4, 2013 So, uh, is it illegal for me to have amazon.com account if I live in Europe? Or to download Kindle books with it? Because I have gotten an Amazon.com gift card and was intending to make use of the great sales they seem to have there... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jon AS Posted January 4, 2013 Share Posted January 4, 2013 I think technically Amazon accounts are global, but if I try to buy Kindle books from the US store it tells me to go to the German one where I bought and registered my Kindle.If you created a seperate account, would you even be able to read books bought there on a device registered to a seperate user without stripping them of DRM first (which I assume would be dead easy but also illegal and might lead to Amazon taking some kind of action if they ever found out)? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Maia Posted January 4, 2013 Share Posted January 4, 2013 Yea, I'd love to learn about all these intricacies too. In my case it is just a Kindle app on the iPad. I have zero problems maintaining Austrian and US iTunes accounts, but it looks like Amazon is a bit more problematic. And here I have thought that I'd be able to use an US giftcard I have accidentially won on some downloads... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MisterOJ Posted January 4, 2013 Share Posted January 4, 2013 This is a good blog about "owning" versus "renting" ebooks. Especially interesting are the couple of comments at the end of the article. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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