Nathan Bransford - The Forums

I love the idea of being able to change the font (sort of). I hate the font on my Kindle.

One thing that I really wish e-readers would allow is the ability for a book's design to translate. I'm well aware of how complicated that is but for so many books, the design adds a lot to the experience. If I design a book in Garamond, I want it to stay in Garamond. That font decision wasn't arbitrary, a lot of thought went into it and it was chosen because it's the right font for the story that's being told. The same goes for running headers, chapter heads and the like. I hate that ebooks all come out looking the same. Hopefully someone will figure out a way to reflow a PDF's text in a way that maintains the design elements so that we can bring a little variety to the ebook world.

Pete wrote:I love the idea of being able to change the font (sort of). I hate the font on my Kindle.

One thing that I really wish e-readers would allow is the ability for a book's design to translate. I'm well aware of how complicated that is but for so many books, the design adds a lot to the experience. If I design a book in Garamond, I want it to stay in Garamond. That font decision wasn't arbitrary, a lot of thought went into it and it was chosen because it's the right font for the story that's being told. The same goes for running headers, chapter heads and the like. I hate that ebooks all come out looking the same. Hopefully someone will figure out a way to reflow a PDF's text in a way that maintains the design elements so that we can bring a little variety to the ebook world.

I agree - there's no technical reason this shouldn't be possible on the iPad, though I imagine the conversion would be much more time-intensive for the design to directly translate, especially when e-reader customers want to be able to control the size of their font.

I wasn't thinking about the iPad as an ereader - I don't like reading for long periods on a backlit screen. lol I spend hours on a computer and I used to spend hours reading on my iTouch (and really, without the 3G, the iPad is an oversized iTouch). now I do it on the kindle and I find it easier on my eyes. plus, the kindle doesn't need to be recharged nearly as often. but for textbooks nothing out today could be better than the iPad. :P as for using it as a normal computer, it is missing flash. I can deal with that on a screen the size of the itouch, but on a larger screen, I want flash. A camera would be nice too but that's not really a killer. If the 2nd generation has flash, plus a free version of word or open office or something . . . There are plenty of apps that make txt files already. There is an app on iTunes that is supposed to work with word, and I don't remember the price, but in terms of the iTunes world, it wasn't cheap.