Standards, Exceptions, and Perfection

Michael Jensen | 03/24/2009 | Digitization

Publishing is all about “exceptions,” I’ve learned over the years. Book X is just like Book Y, except for the parts that aren’t. Book A needs to have call-outs, while Book B is a standard monograph (except for the section with that sideways table, and the chapter-open drop-caps that the designer feels is important). That book has the standard royalty, except for sales in Eastern Europe; this book has a short discount, except when it’s sold via Amazon.

Computers hate exceptions. A software program is happiest when it knows what to expect, and gets just what it expected. Many a “blue screen of death” on a computer comes with the message “uncaught exception found” – because the computer doesn’t know what to do with the exception.

What does that have to do with publishing? Well, it has affected our databases (because database designers tend to presume a constrained list of options), affected our designs (because we want our books to “stand out” in some way, and *not* be template-limited), and affected our thinking about XML and presentation.

The challenge of fitting our exception-riddled publications into a relatively standardized model of presentation (in .epub format, for example) is substantial—yet we can’t afford to have a second form of composition to “design just for the ebook.”

Part of our constraints also come from our “expectation of perfection.” Because book publishing is a capital-heavy process, and because once printed, it can’t be changed, we developed a culture of perfection: no typos, no grammatical errors, no going-back-and-fixing.

The digital world is, and is likely to remain, pretty forgiving. Yes, if I pay for an ebook, I expect high quality—but if I have to scroll around to view that table, or see ugly whitespace around a drop-cap, it’s okay.

So finding ways of accepting imperfection in our digital representations of our books, and of recognizing that we *can* go back and fix something that was missed the first time—may mean the difference between an affordable production process and one that is too expensive. As they say, 99% of the cost of perfection lies in achieving the last 1%.

I’m not saying that we should be sloppy – but if we philosophically accept that our e-books will not look like our p-books, and that those ebooks are more about the content than the presentation, we may save ourselves some heartburn, and a few bucks as well.

Note: not every book makes a good ebook, and design-heavy publications in particular are unlikely to be satisfactory in an ebook format. But shifting the scale of what variance is acceptable may mean that we can reach more readers in the digital environment.

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