2Leaf Press is ecstatic that we have finally gotten all of our print editions available for sale as eBooks. It’s been a long road, but we hope our readers will reap the benefits of our beautifully formatted eBooks! Having said that, I thought it was important to discuss the issue of converting our poetry books to eBooks, the pros and cons, our position in all of this, and what we’ve done to make our eBooks readable and enjoyable.
Poetry is one of the most precise and precious of literary forms. It is also the least adaptable to the growing eBook market. Many poets hate eBooks, and small presses have been hesitant about producing them and as a result, there are not nearly as many poetry eBooks on the market. Some of it is for stodgy reasons, they don’t like change, but a lot of it has to do with how poetry appears in eBooks. Billy Collins has said on the subject that “The difference between prose and poetry is that prose is kind of like water and will become the shape of any vessel you pour it into. Poetry is like a piece of sculpture and can easily break.”
The problem is that since eBooks are flowable text, the width and structure of lines change due to different eReader devices, coupled with the reader’s ability to change the size of the font. eBooks are formatted using HTML coding, and as such, does not recognize tabs and spacing. (Yes, even when you use a Word document to create eBooks, which honestly these days is a big no-no, once the document is converted into an ePub, the tabs are converted into spaces.) All of 2Leaf Press’ books are created as ePubs, which has “sort of” become the standard format for the eBook biz, and are tested in accordance with the IDPF, an organization that “oversees” the production value of eBooks. While hard spaces (a feature that forces spaces to be recognized in HTML coding) can be used, as the line wraps and the text is enlarged, the meaning behind the spacing can get lost in flowable text.
In order to at least “control” how verse looks in eBooks, poetry is automatically coded with an indent so when the line wraps, the line indents slightly, indicating to the reader it is a continuation of a line. Certainly, if a poet uses some spacing (like 10 or 15 spaces), I am inclined to use hard spaces. Now one could create a CSS style to accommodate some spacing that appears consistently throughout a particular poem or throughout the book, but if the poetry has spacing/tabs that push a line far flush right to the page, then ostensibly that line can become a line or two of empty space before it gets to the text, which is not what the poet intended, thus the problem with “excessive” spacing.
Once a book has been typeset and finalized, the book is converted from Indesign to an XHTML editor. I know that Adobe these days touts its improvements in converting its Indesign files to ePub, but any conversion is never 100 percent clean. You still have to deal with typographical issues like em and en dashes, quotes, italics, and spacing between verses, ensuring that they remain intact after the conversion. And then, each book presents its own out-of-the-box format quirks that need to be addressed within a specific framework that jibes with the IDPF. I can honestly say that formatting print books is far easier, and much more fun than formatting an ePub.
So yes, a lot goes into this process, and yes, if the poetry is heavy with spaces and tabs, the look of the ePub will differ from the print edition. I agree that the spacing can kill the nuance of a poem, but I don’t believe it kills the meaning of a poem in its entirety. Having said that, the question is, should poets and small presses continue to ignore eBooks? It’s no longer a phenomenon, it’s a technology that’s here to stay, with millions of people reading eBooks, worldwide. I think it would be foolish to do so. Besides, I have a different idea in mind: I want to use eBooks to gain readership to a print edition of a book.
If a poetry eBook grabs the attention of someone who likes poetry, then the eBook is probably the first step towards purchasing the print edition of the book. If the eBook’s existence helps a teacher use the material so that students can learn more about a poet, then I am all for that. As long as reflowable text is being used to create eBooks, using an indent for overflow text by setting the left margin to the point where you want the second and following lines to flow seems like the best solution at this time. As far as the spacing problems, it’s something that’s dealt with on a book-by-book basis.
By the way, the poetry eBook market is changing. More and more publishers, including small presses, can no longer ignore the shift to digital that has swept the industry. As with some publishers have done and at the suggestion of our 2Leaf poets, we have provided a “disclaimer” in our poetry books, letting readers know that some of the spacing is missing from the books, and recommending that readers use the default font size of their device to view the most accurate representation of a the poetry. As the technology continues to evolve, I’m hoping that issues of spacing in poetry will become resolved in the near future. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy our eBooks. Happy reading!
–Gabrielle David
Publisher
