Fred Hicks and Rob Donoghue have already weighed in. I don’t have anything new to add except possibly my opinion which I think is completely uninteresting. Facts will carry the day and this is clearly a skirmish in the war that will occupy the next several years in the publishing business. The expected (and apropos) analogy with dinosaurs and mammals has been made repeatedly. I believe I alluded to it myself last year sometime.

The only thing I really care about is the fact that I enjoy layout as an art form and the electronic book market, given the direction it’s heading, is poised to change what that is a very great deal. And that’s scary. It means that just as the tools we use for layout are becoming mature, the game is changing under them and again layout is complicated. Complicated is interesting. I’m cool with that. Just scared.

Anyway, is making me re-think Deluge as a product and that’s also a good thing because it lets me address my release fear by not releasing. It’s currently designed as a hybrid product — a PDF that’s built on a US Letter page scaffold with the recognition that some significant body of readers will want to print it. It looks pretty printed — even clever — right now. It also works as a PDF. But as it is an experiment in current electronic publishing, it seems Steve Jobs has insisted that I make it work on a third axis. Okay fine.

So, it has to work in print. It has to work as a functional PDF (that is, printed and on screen). It has to work as a re-flowable form like MOBI or ePub. ePub is a supposedly heavily supported (partially designed) by Adobe. Yet the ePub output from InDesign looks like crap by default, assuming you concentrated on making a cool looking page. Pages are primary to InDesign’s operation and yet the ePub output has no page. You have to think in terms of the “story” and ignore the page for this to work (and yes that means making images inline, which almost always sucks and a half). Okay, I can do this.

Paper and PDF are paginated. ePub (and whatever I convert to from there) is not. I want to have products cross-correlate, so I think Toph’s page insertion scheme is ideal here — at the beginning of each page, the text will contain a reference to the page number, so a reflowed version will identify each page as it would have started in the paged version. I will try to automate this with InDesign and have some ideas. This is fairly inobtrusive (compared with treating the reflowed text as canonical and numbering some fundamental unit of the text, like paragraphs, which is slicker but uglier) but not without controversy. In particular, the implicit declaration that the paged version is canonical strikes me as wrong.

Images have to go inline. That means my lovely margin usage will vanish and images will simply interrupt the text. I can cope.

Sidebars have to go inline. Lots of electronic formats support sidebars but they all suck. The problem is that there’s just not enough real-estate on screen to give sidebars the function that they have on a page — they are either completely intrusive or they are a push-button away and switch between dominant and non-existent. These choices suck. Instead I think I will re-write so that they are not sidebars. This has worked for technical books for ages. Sidebars may be mostly a gimmick anyway–I’m not convinced of their utility beyond breaking up the page and providing visual landmarks.

Cross-references have to be logical rather than literal because they need to become actual links. This is all good.

The deepest issue is one of legibility — it’s not clear to me that a single set of choices will create a legible document when printed on US Letter as when viewed on the screen in print-preview (PDF) form as when viewed in a reflowable form. I can actually ignore the reflowable version — it’s pretty much guaranteed to be legible because its presentation is reader and user dependent.  But for the two presentations that are most deeply at odds, there are serious issues. I’m pretty sure, for example, that it will pay off to use a larger typeface than I would for print-only target because the sorts of devices used to view PDFs are myriad. But this is likely to make print ghastly and paper-intensive unless the intended print form is two-up or four-up. Can I make that assumption? I suppose I can declare it in the product.

The bottom line, though, is that doing layout just became a very different kind of job for RPGs. Novelists have it easy — one typeface and every page the same shape. No diagrams, no tables (ugh tables — that’s going to suck too), and one typeface. But with all these things there are so many opportunities for the RPG layouterizer to make elegant and beautiful choices. Most of which are undermined by the new technology. I think, though, that honestly Apple and Amazon have together changed the landscape.

It will be years before things shake out, but it’s clear that the shaking has started. And I am in a better position to be a mammal than a dinosaur. But fans of that analogy should keep clear in their heads that we still also have a lot of birds in this modern world. Recall that when mammals started eating their eggs, dinosaurs took to the air.

Predicting the future is a mug’s game. The best you can do is react, especially if you’re well positioned to do so cheaply.

–BMurray