Okay! I’ve got basically one month left in which to do my thesis project, so I’m thinking I should try to blog about a little something every day, to force myself to process some of this stuff. Perhaps call it BroTheBloPoMo—Brooklyn Thesis Blog Post Month.
What have I been up to? Well, unless you count reading a lot of trashy novels as e-books, not a whole hell of a lot. But, man, I am rocking the e-book–reading.
It’s not entirely not research. For one thing, I’ve been learning an awful lot about the hyphenation rules in Stanza. They suck. Every time I see what would be counted as an unacceptable break in a dead-tree American trade book, I note it in an annotation. Stanza then lets me view a list of all my annotations, from which I can jump to each offending passage. I’ve also been marking misspellings, logic errors, and infelicitous organization of material (e.g., loading the front of an e-book with tons of sales crap—I’ve already bought the book; just get to the text, please), but those are editorial issues rather than technological ones.1
Some typical composition errors seen in Stanza (not all of which, especially in the last column, are Stanza’s fault):
| Multiple punctuation marks | Word division | Broken compounds | Miscellaneous weirdness |
|---|---|---|---|
| you? ” he |
again- st |
gauntlet—some- thing |
father—- passed |
| Cathedral —” |
the- se |
gentle- men—who |
me—- turn |
| have —?” |
S- tay |
Indian—ob- tained |
people— the |
| boy? ” |
bare-ch- ested |
hard- ness—feel |
average— of |
| they? ” |
S- tarling |
German—some- thing |
anyway— neither |
| it? ” |
respon- se |
mar- riage—or |
life— touring |
| it? ” Jasper |
ch- in |
cof- fee-brown |
this— they |
| then? ” |
six- th |
Ex- cept”—she |
them— as |
| him? ” Rebecca |
ch- estnut |
ill-re- pute |
too— she |
| down? ” |
Sh- effield |
self-con- scious |
him— where |
| “— he |
ch- intz |
old-fash- ioned |
too— a |
| him? ” he |
ch- in |
rose-be- decked |
encouragingly— and |
| modis- tes |
sweet-na- tured |
so— she | |
| on- ce |
twen- ty-seven |
circle— the | |
| s- pars |
Ex- pensive-looking |
referred— she | |
| ch- intzy |
heavy-lid ded |
now- predictable | |
| o’- clock |
like- ly-looking |
cleft-—“I’ll | |
| child—y- our |
late-sum- mer |
large— He | |
| per- ch |
wa- ter-filled |
for-sake | |
| seven- th |
morn- ing-room |
||
| re- al |
four- teen-year-old |
||
| prince—n- ever |
stir- rer-up |
||
| belowstairs—k- itchens |
it- self—it |
||
| champag- ne |
well-be- ing |
||
| Th- ese |
it—ex- cessively |
||
| you—n- ever |
coun- try-bred |
||
| urns—w- ere |
moth- er-in-law |
||
| the- se |
John-the-Bap- tist |
You get the idea. These are from multiple books, but many of the nastiest breaks—ch-in, ch-est, again-st, the-se, on-ce, n-ever—appear over and over again. Stanza’s still my e-reader application of choice, but that’s mostly because it’s so easy to download my Fictionwise bookshelf into it. I’ve been buying my e-books almost exclusively from Fictionwise, so that’s key.
(Cross-posted at my schoolwork blog, which nobody reads)
- Though they could be technological issues. It would be great if the e-reading app had a built-in means of reporting typos to the publisher, so that they could be corrected for future downloads; or perhaps the reader could just correct the word in his or her own copy. Clever Eucalyptus encourages users to send screenshots of bad typesetting, presumably so algorithms can be tweaked.
The Eucalyptus feedback system:
And if the front matter, ad card, and the like were marked as such, the e-reader software could then offer users choices such as “hide all front matter” or “display front matter at end of book.” I’d want a global setting, so all my books open to the first page of the main text and have any extraneous material glommed on at the very end.
In terms of feedback, I think that’s a great idea. One do-able project: figure out a way to facilitate corrections on the fly for Project Gutenberg.
I’ve bookmarked a few errors I’ve found in their books, but haven’t actually managed to send corrections in. :(
If there were an on-the-page option (e.g. pushing the bottom right corner, instead of the top right; or doing something with the line), upon book completion you could be asked if you want to review + send your fixes…
Anyway, I think it would be possible to make such a system, and if you modify a reader that does this, I’ll read at least one book with it to test it out!
Yes, I was just thinking this on my way to class today: it would be awesome to integrate something like Distributed Proofreaders into e-reader apps. Maybe there should be an open typo-reporting standard, and a central reporting place where the corrections get collated, and then publishers can track all their books by ISBN or something. The system could accommodate p-books as well as e-books.
Hmm. Would have made a nice thesis project. Darnit.
[…] is that most apps, and most publishers, fully justify text by default. On a small screen, with primitive hyphenation algorithms, this is what most often makes me want to stab myself in the eye. At a very small font size, it can […]