Book Biz: Fonts 101, Improbable Libraries, Cheerios Gives eBooks, Barnes and Noble Stabilizing

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The loss of the typesetting industry happened without much notice. A lot of publishers, especially those entering the field post-Y2K, probably think typesetters were just glorified typists anyway. The welcome embrace of desk top publishing twenty years ago let authors and publishers do all the prep work themselves. The loss of the typesetting industry happened without much notice. A lot of publishers, especially those entering the field post-Y2K, probably think typesetters were just glorified typists anyway. The welcome embrace of desk top publishing twenty years ago let authors and publishers do all the prep work themselves.

“And this is the purpose of typography: The arrangement of design elements within a given structure should allow the reader to easily focus on the message, without slowing down the speed of his reading.”     Hermann Zapf

But a primary function of book typography was designing the book…the entire book. Cover design comes to mind but that was generally handed over to a staff graphic designer. The nuts and bolts of good design involved typeface and font size. Aside from aesthetics, which is reason enough, good design has a number of unexpected benefits, whether it’s for a printed book or an ereader.

The typeface for the text needed to be chosen and then a size in “points” specified. The space between the lines of type was “leading” and that needed to be appropriately considered. If the designer called for Garamond 8/6 it meant that the font would be 8 point and the leading would be 6 point. Kerning, the space between the letters, could be adjusted.

Chapter openings presented a wide array of options. Would the chapter title be in the same typeface or would a different face be better? How low should the title drop and then how low will the text drop beneath the title? Would all chapters open recto, meaning some verso pages would be blank?

Where would the folios go? Head or foot, left, right or centered? Again, would another typeface enhance the folios and what size would it be?

Would running head or feet enable the reader to browse the book? More typeface questions. And what about margins? Classic design would say push the text up toward the head and in toward the spine, but how much? Today’s default is center the text on the page. Would that look better?

I published a book some time ago and I can honestly say I considered almost none of these things…and compared to professionally designed books, you can tell.

Type is such a basic and integral part of book production that I’m trying to at least understand the who, what, where, when and how of type design and usage.

The history begins with early cave paintings, then Egyptian hieroglyphics that morphed from representational art to standardized characters in the shape of objects, then to forms that abstractly defined objects and finally to shapes that described a sound rather than an object.

image002The difference in the terms typeface and font is subtle. In the 15th century, metal type was sorted and stored in a box called a font. You might have Times Roman in one box, Times Roman bold in another, and Times Roman light in yet another. Each box contained a different font, but taken all together, they are fonts in the Times Roman typeface. Stacking all the Times Roman boxes together would describe a font family, the design that identifies them as Times Roman is the typeface.

image003During the modern era of typography and printing, the terms uppercase and lowercase evolved because capital letters were stored in a type case usually stored above a case of small letters. The cases were physically different to take advantage of the size difference between the two. Prior to letterpress typesetting, uppercase letters were termed “majuscule” while lower case were “minuscule”.

Unfortunately, today typeface selection has devolved to the point that there are basically just two faces that are used in the majority of printed matter. Out of many thousand fonts, we use Times (serif) and Arial (sans serif). That’s it.

The ability to more easily design modern typefaces has led to an explosion of creative type design. It’s not uncommon for a publication or business to have a unique typeface created for their use.

Did you know that all of the Inter State road signs in America use the same typeface, one that was specifically designed for that purpose? It’s called Clearview Hwy. The story of how the specifications were written and how the designers developed it describes an unusual situation of creating a face for one and only one usage.

“In a badly designed book, the letters mill and stand like starving horses in a field. In a book designed by rote, they sit like stale bread and mutton on the page. In a well-made book, where designer, compositor and printer have all done their jobs, no matter how many thousands of lines and pages, the letters are alive. They dance in their seats. Sometimes they rise and dance in the margins and aisles.”
Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style

Just for the heck of it, try using a different typeface than Times or Arial, but please, not Comic Sans, a face that’s universally reviled on the typography web sites.

Apple Evades Oversight

In its bid to be the final arbiter of all things digital, Apple has been uncooperative with those charged with measuring Apple’s compliance with court ordered anti-trust monitoring. Shocker!

Scribd Takes on Audio Subscriptions

Last November Scribd jumped into subscription audio books with 30,000 titles that could be streamed or downloaded for $8.99 per month, which also included full ebook access. Penguin Random House just added 9,000 of their titles to Scribd’s list including Game of Thrones and Fifty Shades of Grey, making 45,000 titles available, way more than Kindle Unlimited’s offerings.

UK Indy Bookstores Disappear like PubsCharing Cross bookstore

Public houses (pubs) have been closing in the UK for years. Apparently the village bookstore is about to face the same fate.

Children’s Print Book Sales Climb

Another market that remains vibrant in traditional book sales is the children’s market which continues to show spirited growth in numerous countries.

The-Mongolian-Childrens-M-007Improbable Libraries

Like baseball, banjos and saxophones, America claims credit for the first lending libraries. The role of libraries continues to be stretched and redefined by offering the world’s knowledge to everyone.

Coloring Books Take Off (Whaaaat?)

Amazon’s best selling book is a coloring book …for grown-ups. I’m not sure I understand this craze but I’m glad that folks are buying paper and ink books.

Canada’s Clueless Bus Driver

This is either the nanny society on steroids, a school bus driver who’s a control freak, or a very illiterate driver who can’t comprehend why someone would sit quietly on a school bus and read. Canadian authorities are too polite to say which it is.

Kobo Uses Value to Fight Kindle

Kobo designed their new Glo reader by listening to die-hard book lovers. It reads more like a book, outperforms the base Kindle and costs $70 less.

January Book Sales Up, Except for eBooks

While trade book sales climbed over year ago numbers, ebook sales declined 10% in January.

Banana, Milk, Sugar, Kobo and CheeriosCheerios41

While there’s no toy in the box, 8.4 million Cheerios consumers will get free access to nine different ebooks via BookShout.

Kindle Does Marketing eBooks

I have no idea why Kindle publishing an ebook featuring Land Rovers is worthy of breathless headlines. Didn’t any millennials work in the industry before Kindles? What’s next? They’re already awash in CEO autobiographies.

Kindle Unlimited Payments Shrink Again

While Kindle Unlimited’s customer base grew again, payouts to publishers/authors have continued to shrink.

UK Publishers Prosper. Authors? Not So Much.

While UK austerity moves are more rhetoric than policy at this point, UK publishers continue to throttle authors’ paychecks despite the fact that they’re earning a tidy sum, thank you.

B and NWall Street Notices B&N

While many were busy writing Barnes & Noble’s obituary, things there improved while we weren’t watching. In the past two years it paid off its debt, tightened up financial controls and brought Samsung in as a partner in developing the new Nook. Has its demise been canceled or postponed?

Final Thought

If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed. Benjamin Franklin

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I've worked in book manufacturing for over 30 years, closing my company Baker Johnson, Inc. in 2005. Currently I work freelance with a large group of publishers, advising them on the printing options available to them as the book industry endures major restructuring.
My wife Cathy is a retired psychologist and spent most of her career working with the youth at Maxey Boys Training School. She is a small mammal rehabilitator with Friends of Wildlife.
Our daughter Whitney is a PharmD working in the Denver area evaluating the pharmaceutical requirements of nursing homes. Our son Eliot lives in Waterloo and is an editor at Mathematical Reviews in Ann Arbor.