The American type designer, Frederic Goudy, is reputed to have said that “[a]ny one who would letterspace lower case would steal sheep.” That is the source for the title of a wonderful book on type design by Erik Spiekermann & E.M. Ginger: Stop Stealing Sheep & find out how type works. The book uses straightforward language to talk about the application of design principles to type, acknowledging that in the age of the personal computer the tools of the trade have become accessible to almost everybody. The first edition was published in 1993 so it doesn’t have anything to say about typography on web pages, the challenges posed by cascading style sheets, nor about the hand-wringing that designers inflict on themselves as they try to make their work uniform across browsers and operating systems. Nevertheless the book’s lessons are clear: the visual impact of a typeface can be as important as the text itself; it’s easy to learn and implement principles of good type design; and those who ignore these facts are, well, no better than sheep stealers (or cattle rustlers if you’re more of a beef person). Unfortunately, atrocious type design has proliferated like swine flu through a pork farm, and the problem has only grown worse with the appearance of Amazon’s Kindle 2.
Let’s be fair and acknowledge that some people love the Kindle. Oprah, for instance, has called it “life-changing for me” and “the wave of the future.” And it has received solid reviews from tech journals like Wired magazine. Nevertheless, most reviews conclude with: “the best e-reader on the market” which is not as resounding an endorsement as one might think given that it’s a faulty technology still in its infancy.
Detractors abound and raise numerous issues:
• DRM – Books downloaded to the Kindle 2 are subject to digital rights management. The terms are set by publishers. This has resulted in a PR nightmare for Amazon first, because it deleted Animal Farm and 1984 from customer accounts (see my post on this), second, because books in the public domain are still subject to the DRM restrictions, and third, it allows publishers to disable the text-to-speech function which can render it useless for the visually impaired.
• Topaz – The Kindle 2 displays books in a proprietary format called Topaz which cannot be read by other e-readers except those licensed by Amazon (so far Apple’s iPhone is the only licensee, since ignoring the Apple effect would be commercially foolish). The Kindle 2 can also read documents in pdf and epub formats by converting them to Topaz for a small fee. However, in a complete head-scratcher, Amazon takes a dim view of e-book publishers who try to offer products in the Topaz format.
• Pricing – Amazon’s e-books cost too much given the savings in physical materials, warehousing space, and shipping costs.
• Monotype Caecilia – Amazon has adopted the Henry Ford approach to reading. You can read your e-books in whatever font you like as long as it’s Caecilia.
• Layout and Design – read Nicholson Baker’s thorough-going review of the Kindle 2 in the New Yorker. Chief among his complaints is the fact that Topaz reduces type to text. This is a non-issue if you use the Kindle only to read the latest trade paperbacks. But it destroys books with illustrations; it makes mince-meat of technical manuals that display tables; and it undermines the experience of reading a newspaper. In short, Amazon has no regard for the visual aesthetics of the reading experience. It assumes that text is reducible to ASCII codes.
There is another issue I have yet to encounter in discussions of e-readers, and that is the relationship between literacy and access to books on the one hand, and social responsibility and democratic values on the other hand. Those who sound the death-knell of print media should take care that they not inadvertently associate themselves with a classist or elitist view of social order. Democratic values depend upon an engaged citizenry. Citizens are engaged when they inform themselves about current events and issues. It has long been recognized that such engagement is not possible without literacy and access to written materials, especially print journalism. However, if we view the Kindle model as the future of reading, then we are envisioning a future in which both of those requirements are compromised.
Literacy begins in early childhood and is best served by frequent exposure to books and adult models who daily demonstrate the value and importance of reading. Can you imagine sitting with a child on your knee, reading a bedtime story from the drab gray-green print of an Amazon Kindle? I didn’t think so. When I think of my own children and their first books, I think of well-illustrated large-print books that stayed with us for a year at most, then found a new home with one of our nephews or nieces, or with a neighbour, or the local daycare centre, or a community book sale. A children’s book has a social purpose that has nothing to do with possession or DRM — it is a tool to encourage a child to read and to fuel a child’s already-fertile imaginative life. A children’s book isn’t a proper children’s book unless it can be pored over beneath the covers with a flashlight and slept with and passed around and given away. How does the Kindle promote this kind of experience?
Couple the Kindle’s DRM & visual klunkiness with its $359 price tag and, far from promoting a positive reading experience, the Kindle becomes a barrier to social participation. When the e-reader becomes as ubiquitous as the cell phone (as Bezos hopes it will) and deprecates print media (as the cell phone has deprecated the public pay phone), how will the homeless stay informed? How will single working mothers read to their children? How will teens afford the $10 per book pricetag as they begin to enter the world of reading? How will university students cope when they can no longer scrounge used copies or borrow from friends?
For my part, I will continue to nurture my book fetish while encouraging people and organizations to make digital print freely available. And, of course, I will cry out against anybody who steals sheep.