2009/3/25 Les Denham <lden...@hal-pc.org>
> [...] The Press ceased operations because Morris ran out of
> money. It never made a profit, never broke even, in spite of the high
> prices
> charged for its books.
>
What I can say in that case... Economy against traditions. Traditions
against economy. There is nothing wrong with handling typography by oneself
while author has knowledge about rules. Often not.
Software like LaTeX and LyX allows non-experts to approximate some of the
> goals of typographers like Morris without incurring his costs. The
> software
> solutions do not reach the standards of the best book designers and
> typographers, but they can get closer than many (most?) published books do.
>
I would like to limit this "get closer"... I like reading book, one of
pleasures is taking nicely typeset and printed book, with all the art on the
covers and so on. Here in Poland we have quite large number of nice editions
and most e-books are received as poor quality "guides to life" - in our
culture such kind of publication often do not fit to needs. They become
somehow popular, as its quality is growing. Lot of them are published and
sold by companies specialized with such publication. I do not know any
example of such business model in Poland, as Steve successful have with his
book for couple of years. I cannot tell from scientific point of view as I
personally do not publish anything scientific related (some engineering
stuff is published inside corporation I work for - in Word certainly), but
belletristic book are available only through professional publishers and
they become popular (if become) as effect of publications in press or by
good marketing. Every county has different model, different traditions,
different culture.
I personally prefer books printed on paper. I used to be a passionate of
Desktop Publishing some time ago, that is way I like to "protect" the
typesetting traditions. It is important to me as though good music.
--
Manveru
jabber: manv...@manveru.pl
gg: 1624001
http://www.manveru.pl
