On electronic copies of Cadence & Slang.
Everybody keeps asking me why Cadence & Slang doesn’t yet exist as an iPad app, or PDF, or Kindle, or whatever else the hot e-format of the day is. There’s no way that I can answer that quickly. I can tell them “no” and then they ask “why not” and then I have to go all on a fugue-rant about the future of the form and typography and layout and then they just think I’m a wanker and my other friends buy another round, for which I completely do not blame them, because they’ve probably heard the iPad rant around 50 times already, and oh dear god is he really going on about the side notes again. So here’s that rant, placed here so I can link folks to it instead of constantly derailing otherwise nice conversations about nice things. For the time being, it’s the final word on the matter.
As someone who clearly cares a lot about technology, this puts me in an uncomfortable position. Because I’m definitely an early adopter and power user and I love having my content in many forms. But I’m torn between that and the desire to make Cadence & Slang fit the form of an ebook well.
In one section of my book, I talk about various devices prescribing the norms of the interface that you’re making. Think “mac-like” applications written for OS X v. cross-platform ones that try to work well enough all over the place. So it is with the text itself. The pages are a little wide to accommodate the reader’s thumbs, as well as a running log of side notes. Where do the side notes go in an ebook? Additionally, it’s printed offset, which is a very high-resolution and costly means of printing, one that’s around 4 to 8 times better than most commercial laser printers. Moreover, it’s a resolution at which the main typeface prospers. I would not use Feijoa for a computer screen, even a high-resolution one like the Retina Display. It would look like garbage; in certain contexts it may even be illegible. The parts about color wouldn’t make any sense on any black-and-white ebook readers, and they would likely have to be substantially rewritten or removed. Different devices render margins differently. The Kindle doesn’t support too many typefaces for its basic format, and in its current form, Cadence & Slang looks like shit on an iPad. (Don’t believe me? Load this excerpt on your iPad and judge for yourself!)
And all of this ignores the fact that, last year, I raised $12,000 solely to support a print run of the book. None of that money went to pay my food or rent; it went to dead trees and shipping those dead trees. My work went to support the text in that particular form, and I stand by it.
That gets to the heart of the argument, the big bold statement that you’ve scrolled down to: translating Cadence & Slang to another format is not simply a question of cutting and pasting. It means I have to translate its attention to detail, its innate quality, the things that make it a good artifact. This will require selecting new typefaces, laying out the entire text, changing its typography to fit the most common screen sizes and resolutions, making any revisions and errata that have popped up in the past few months, and in short, making it fit the form.
My readers don’t deserve any less than this.
I spent two years busting my ass on this thing, but ultimately, I was in no hurry. I’m not going to rush its release on digital devices, putting out anything half-baked, simply because some of my customers ask me to. I hear you, all of you, and I want to do it - but I also want to do it right.
I am honored and humbled by your collective interest in my book. The amount of publicity that I’ve received is totally beyond my expectations. So I ask for your patience in my delivering a good electronic experience.
Your computer is going to be thrown away sometime in the next four years. Your Kindle probably won’t last another two. But, with luck, copies of my book - as it’s printed - will outlast all the technology that you’re asking me to support. It might even outlast me. And I think that’s a pretty great sentiment.
(And one more thing: if you bought the book or backed my Kickstarter project, you’re receiving the electronic edition of it - whatever form it comes in - for free. There’s no reason you should have to pay twice for it.)
Thanks to Todd vanGoethem and Erin Watson for reading early drafts of this.
