I'm with Apple all the way here. If Mike got what he wanted, I'd have a much poorer user experience. There's no way I'm ploughing through a book set in some godawful sans. Apple's way allows me to choose the fonts I want in a book.
"Serif, ew!!" tells me everything I need to know about not letting designers like this control my eBooks.
How do you deal with sans in a web browser? Custom stylesheets? Why not allow custom stylesheets in your ebook reader? Better yet, why have this separate ebook reader at all and put the books in the browser (potentially with extended UI elements and support like PDFs) where they belong.
If I buy a book, I want to get the book how the publisher, editor, author, and designer intended. It is wrong for Apple to intentionally change the display of the book from the design that was intended. If you want to override the styling in your books, fine, but this shouldn't be mandated.
Why not allow custom stylesheets? Because the vast majority of Apple's customers can't write them, is why.
As I said below, perhaps the specified fonts should be a default with alternatives in a menu, but until then, it's vastly preferable that they use the reader's font and not the book's.
This isn't a printed book, as the woeful justification should prove. Designers don't get nearly as much control.
(Ultimately, I think they will offer an option to use the specified fonts. There's so much wrong with iBooks it feels like the most unfinished 1.0 product out of Apple since Aperture)
As for putting them in the browser: a vanilla browser is possibly the worst way to display seriously large amounts of plain text. By the time you've added all the custom elements needed for good reading, you're at a full app anyway. It could be a web app, sure, but that's a different discussion.
You don't need to give the user the full power to write a custom stylesheet, just a friendly way to change common properties like paragraph font.
I am not suggesting a vanilla browser at all. I am suggesting putting all of the browsing-like functionality (books, newspapers, arbitrary hypertext) in the same application. I don't care whether it is compiled-in, a plugin, or a web app but if it's not even in the browser then it's a bad user experience from my perspective. I want a unified reading experience. I want unified search shortcuts. I want unified bookmarks and hyperlinks in books that open web pages in tabs.
Forcing users to switch apps for a data format that accomplishes most of the same things that the Web accomplishes diminishes the value of the format to the user. Application balkanization is not the answer and the fighting between vendor and publisher over page styling has already played out in the browser.
That doesn't change the fact that Apple is ignoring the published standard.
If that's what they want to do, then they should call it a proprietary format and let people choose whether they want to use it, not have their cake and eat it too.
Good point. Does the standard insist on the specified fonts, or are clients allowed to overrule them according to user prefs? If the latter, a fix is just an additional "book default" entry in the fonts menu.
(If the former, that's a lousy standard, right there)
The standard doesn't do anything about specific fonts. The standard DOES have facilities to set a font family, i.e. serif, sans-serif, fixed-width, etc.
It throws off formatting for a lot of books if you screw with that sort of thing. Which is what Apple is doing.
"Serif, ew!!" tells me everything I need to know about not letting designers like this control my eBooks.