[OLPC library] Preferred font size for ebooks on the XO?

[Chris Leonard]

On Thu, Jul 10, 2008 at 5:04 PM, Diane Serley <olpc.aunti.mame at gmail.com>
wrote:

> This works well for a tech document or a picturebook, but not so well for a
> novel.  If its HTML there is no pagination... you can only break by
> chapters. But there are no other markers that let you, for example, stop at
> page 127 and pick it up again there tomorrow. Instead, you have to stop in
> Chapter 8 and then tomorrow search through Chapter 8 to get to the place you
> stopped at -- do-able, but vaguely inconvenient.
>
> Here's an example: I just formatted the novel Jane Eyre. Formatting for the
> XO the book ends up being 443 pages long or 38 chapters. I personally
> wouldn't want to read that as 38 HTML pages. They would be waaaay to long
> and finding where I might have stopped previously would be a pain. And I
> especially wouldn't want to have 443 HTML pages!
>
> I guess I'm hung up on the "book" portion of "e-book" and expecting e-books
> to behave like books with pagination. Am I just being old-fashioned?
>
> Not to put too fine a point on it, but you are formatting Jane Eyre, so
maybe a just little old-fashioned :-)

I am a big fan of HTML for a variety of reasons (in particular for the type
of content I want to develop), but in the end of the day, format choice must
be heavily influenced by intended use.  In the case of a novel, I think PDF
is a very strong contender and at the moment, the obvious choice (until some
other sort of e-book software with fancier features comes along in Sugar).

For shorter works that are intended more for reference use (random access)
than front-to-back reading (serial access), the advantages oif HTML may
begin to tip the scales, particularly if you put in the time to do good
indexing and hyperlinking.  Most novels are not really very hypertextual in
nature, particularly those from the 19th century.  Slightly off-topic, there
was a time when serialization of novels was all the rage and I have to
wonder if such a work might be the exception where HTML actually conveys
the author's intent (and original reader's experience) even more accurately
than current bound versions.

cjl
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