VQR Now Available for the iPad
By Kevin Morrissey and Waldo Jaquith
June 8th, 2010
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We’re excited to announce that the first digital version of VQR, the Spring 2010 issue, is now available for sale at Apple’s iBookstore at an introductory price of just $3.99. Developed completely in-house, the Spring 2010 issue has been optimized for the iPad, taking advantage of all of the device’s advanced features. iPad owners can download a free 29-page sample of the issue to get an idea of what it looks like. From what we can tell, we’re one of the first magazines for sale in the iBookstore.
The ePub version of the Spring issue contains almost everything found in the print version*, and also includes interviews with four of the contributors to the issue.
In the next few months, we intend to offer the ePub version of the magazine to all current subscribers for free or at a low cost.
It may seem a bit narrow to produce a version of the publication solely for the iPad—rather than supporting the Kindle, Nook, or Sony Reader—but it was a decision that we came to after a lot of study and consideration. It is important to us that we distribute VQR in a manner that is open, unencumbered by the limitations of digital rights management and patents. And it is important to us that the photographs in our pages be reproduced without a significant loss in quality. This leaves only e-readers that support the ePub standard, which rules out the Kindle. The Nook and the Reader have only crude black-and-white displays, leaving the iPad as the only candidate that meets our criteria. Apple is slated to release their eBooks software for the iPhone and iPod Touch, which will make our digital edition of the magazine available on any of the one hundred million portable Apple devices in use today. We hope to support more devices in the future as they embrace the ePub standard and full-color images.
Those who have been following digital publishing trends in the magazine world will note that we took a different path than other magazines by publishing VQR as an ePub. (Several dozen magazines are available for the Kindle, but in our opinion, they look awful.) Nearly every magazine selling a digital edition for the iPad is doing so as a stand-alone application. This is a mistake. Releasing issues of magazines as apps is bad for readers and publishers alike. True, the ePub format is not ideal for magazines, but the ePub Revision Working Group has a new release slated for next spring that will remedy that. VQR has been around for 85 years. We take the long view. The open, simple, accessible, indexable, archivable ePub format is clearly the best option for us and for our readers.
A note on the design process: At this early stage in their development, most e-books are crude looking compared to a well-designed print publication. They have few or no images, very little thought is put into typography, layout, or the reader’s experience. The ePub edition of VQR is quite the opposite. We have produced what we believe to be the most advanced ePub available. Period. We take a great deal of pride in the design of our magazine, and our standards are no different when publishing electronically. That said, technology does not quite yet give us the sort of fine-grained detail that we have when producing a print edition, so it simply doesn’t look as nice as the print version. The photographs are smaller, there is no hyphenation, we can’t control widows and orphans (and the occasional blank page), and it’s generally not perfect, but it is awfully good.
Everything about this is experimental, from the pricing to the format, so we’re eager to get feedback. E-mail us, send us a Tweet, or post a comment here to let us what what you think after you buy a copy.
* In the ePub version, we are only able to show 3 of the 24 pages of Joe Sacco’s graphic journalism, “The Unwanted, Part 2.” The full piece is available in the print edition and online for our subscribers.
Category: Bookselling Publishing VQR
The Virginia Quarterly Review
June 9th, 2010 at 1:55 pm
Excellent work, Waldo. The screenshots give me new hope for iBooks. Nice to know that full justification isn’t forced by the app.
June 9th, 2010 at 4:07 pm
I don’t think that we could have stomached releasing a fully justified version of the magazine. :) I mean, conceptually, sure, but the typographical rendering is just so terrible on every device out there–not just the iPad–that we couldn’t bear the sight of it.
We actually considered releasing a Kindle version of the magazine, earlier this year. But after borrowing a Kindle and studying some publications, we decided that it was just too horrible. We couldn’t inflict it on our readers.
June 9th, 2010 at 8:10 pm
Waldo, I just downloaded your 42-page sample and I’m astonished at how good it looks. Kudos to you. This is far and away the best ePub document I’ve seen and the typography and other details have given me some encouragement. Mostly what we see in “ebooks” are woeful, so this is really good news.
Of course the photos really benefit from the iPad display and it makes you feel that, with the development of better typographic tools at some point we will have excellent documents on this platform.
June 10th, 2010 at 3:05 am
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June 10th, 2010 at 9:41 am
Well thank you, Joel, that’s very kind of you to say, particularly given your background. :)
FWIW, I think (and hope!) that in a year, we’ll all look back at this first ePub of VQR and say, in surprise, “that was the best thing around?” Which is to say, while it looks nice, it only looks nice in comparison to the great majority of e-books out there right now. Kindle books have lowered the bar so much that, by simply adding some color, taking advantage of CSS3, adding some photos, and actually taking a bit of time to give some thought to design, we’ve got something that gets people excited. My hope is that this will provide some ammunition to convince more publishers to give free rein to designers like you (and Threepress Consulting, who has been really helpful and, frankly, inspiring). Y’all know how to make great-looking e-pubs. Surely there are no surprises in our e-pub–it’s not like you looked at it and said Rag right! Who ever considered such a possibility?! ;) So let’s look forward to the day when this issue looks boring, hopefully not too far off.
June 10th, 2010 at 11:22 am
Nicely done! I’m curious as to how you handled the captions.
Also: Why does the first piece “Graveyard of Empires” not appear in TOC? Intentional?
June 10th, 2010 at 11:44 am
[...] announcing their decision to publish on the iPad specifically, VQR said on their blog: It may seem a bit narrow to produce a version of the publication solely for the iPad—rather than [...]
June 10th, 2010 at 12:02 pm
Thanks! The images and captions are both parts of definition lists (DL tags). The image is the definition term (DT), and the caption is the definition itself (DD). They’re styled with just a bit of CSS. They can be left-aligned, right-aligned, or full width. To see the source, just look at any article with images on our site (like this one).
I just panicked for sixty seconds before I remembered that was intentional. :)
That’s a hold-over from the print design, although one that I’m not sure that we should maintain going forward. Like some other publications, we don’t include the editor’s introduction in the TOC of the magazine. Duplicating that in the ePub is just an imitation of the print publication, although not necessarily a very smart imitation. :) That’s one of many things that I’m rethinking as I prepare to produce the ePub for the summer issue. From where I’m sitting right now, I think we need to include it in the TOC in some capacity, largely because of the difference in the media. I’ll riffle through a print magazine and, often, read it from back to front. Generally I don’t bother with the TOC. But I’ve found, on the iPad, that I read via the TOC, rather than flipping through the pages. So many people may simply never find the editor’s introduction under the present arrangement. I’m glad you mentioned it!
June 10th, 2010 at 12:55 pm
Why iPad only? I’m an Android user, and the Aldiko app is a pretty good reading experience for epub files in my opinion.
June 10th, 2010 at 2:18 pm
Waldo’s comments about the best way to handle differences between print and ePub TOCs raise an important issue that many magazine and newspaper publishers will want to consider: Should you provide a (pretty) TOC in XHTML in your ePub and a much different machine-readable TOC in your NCX?
My guess is yes, and it’s nice to see folks like VQR exploring how meaningfully-crafted XHTML TOCs might have a place in ePubs for some types of content. In general, putting an XHTML TOC in the front on an ePub for a _book_ is a mistake, as support for the hierarchical, machine-readable NCX TOC format is generally so good among ePub readers. In the book case, a generated TOC at the front of the book’s content is often redundant and ineffective. Specifically, magazines are more likely to prepare TOCS that are filled with useful abstracts and/or pictures, so they deserve to be retained (in some fashion).
The Working Group for the next EPUB revision (just getting under way) has two “Problems” related to magazines in ePub and the issue of TOCs: the more focused “enhanced navigation support” (#6) and the more general “enhanced article support” (#3). I’d be delighted to hear some feedback from the wider community on these topics in light of the VQR ePub/sample.
June 10th, 2010 at 2:18 pm
Here’s the Charter itself for that EPUB revision Working Group: http://www.idpf.org/idpf_groups/IDPF-EPUB-WG-Charter-4-6-2010.html
June 10th, 2010 at 2:19 pm
There are three reasons.
The first is that we have optimized this for the iPad. It looks really, really great on the iPad. But I want to explain “optimized.” This is a totally valid collection of HTML and CSS. It relies on no quirks of the iPad, no custom extensions. The iPad just has a really great renderer. Things look exactly like they’re supposed to–that is, exactly as they look in Chrome, Safari, Firefox, etc., and exactly as my mental rendering engine says they should look. :) In every other major ePub reader I’ve tried, that is not at all true. This is what our table of contents looks like in Adobe Digital Editions, which isn’t even vaguely like what it’s supposed to look like. Note that ADE can’t even handle Unicode characters–the em dash in the header comes out as a question mark. We’ve got a series of poems by Tadeusz Różewicz in this issue. The only way to get the ż to render in ADE was–no kidding–to save the ż as a GIF and inline it. That’s ghastly. I refuse. There are many problems like this for every major ePub reader. We don’t want people to buy this, attempt to read it, and be left with a terrible experience. It’s not fair to readers and, honestly, we don’t really want to have to provide tech support for our issues. :) So by selling solely via iBookstore, we know that the folks buying it are reading it on the iPad, and it will work well.
The second reason is that iBookstore is taking care of fulfillment for us. That’s easier and cheaper then selling copies ourselves and then having to get the ePub files to people. I’m actually ~80% of the way through writing the code for us to do our own fulfillment because, yeah, people should have options, and we shouldn’t be locked into Apple, as happy as we are with them.
The third is a matter of resources. I don’t own an Android device. Or a Nook. Or a Sony Reader. Etc. So I couldn’t test this on those platforms. How does our ePub look on Aldiko? I’ve got no idea. We’d have to sell a lot of ePubs to justify buying even one of these devices to test it on.
But I do want to respond to your overall concern: Yes, this sucks for non-iPad owners, which is to say a supermajority of potential buyers. We are severely limiting who can purchase this with this decision. That is not a permanent approach. This ePub is experimental, and we want to test publishing as ePub with as little financial commitment as possible. If we sell a bunch of copies of this (or lots of people say “jeez, I’d buy a copy, but I don’t have an iPad”), then maybe we can justify taking the time to open things up. After all, it’s ironic for us to go out of our way to use an open format (ePub), eschewing DRM, only to require people to own an iPad to read it. Not not ironic in a Williamsburg way, but ironic in…well, yeah, a Williamsburg way. ;)
June 10th, 2010 at 2:29 pm
I struggled with this, Keith. The programmer in me says “don’t repeat yourself“–two TOCs are anathema. But I decided to include an HTML TOC for two reasons. The first is the one that you cited–having useful abstracts. Many of our articles’ titles just aren’t useful when standing alone. (“Unapproachable Light,” “The Talking Season,” “The Unwanted,” and “Smallish” are titles of essays and poems in this issue, for example.) The second reason is that few EPUB readers respect the hierarchical nature of TOCs. The NCX can be nested, allowing a poetry chapter, then a su-chapter for each author, and then a sub-subchapter for each poem. But generated TOCs (such as on the iPad) often ignore this hierarchy, and without a visual cue, the reader is just left with a straight listing of titles that they cannot understand.
None of this is to say that the approach that we’ve taken here is the right one, and I’m glad to see you point to this as something in need of further consideration. Because I still come back to the “don’t repeat yourself” rule–having two TOCs just isn’t right.
June 10th, 2010 at 4:07 pm
There are other ePub readers for the iPad besides iBooks. I personally use Stanza instead but files purchased in the iBooks store can only be read with that app. I’d appreciate it if you offered the ePub for sale in other online stores as well.
June 10th, 2010 at 4:25 pm
Actually, that’s not true. Any file that you purchase in the iBookstore is available in iTunes for you to do with as you see fit. DRM-encumbered books are a different story, of course, but since our ePub has no DRM, you are free to move it to any program that you like, Stanza or otherwise.
June 11th, 2010 at 11:09 am
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June 12th, 2010 at 5:45 am
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June 17th, 2010 at 4:30 am
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June 22nd, 2010 at 7:21 am
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June 23rd, 2010 at 3:11 am
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June 23rd, 2010 at 9:02 am
But if I understand this correctly, you are using tag soup and 1997-era “HTML” hacks. In the olden days developers who didn’t know what they were doing used
BLOCKQUOTEas a fake means of indention; haven’t you used definition lists for the same faux-purpose?Whether you like it or not or know how to do it or not, you must use perfectly valid, perfectly semantic markup in ePubs. XHTML 1.1 cannot be trifled with.
June 23rd, 2010 at 3:08 pm
And I see your comment form can’t understand anything beyond the US-ASCII imprinted on your keyboard.
June 24th, 2010 at 3:44 am
Any plans to make VQR available on foreign iBookstores (e.g., Canada)?
June 24th, 2010 at 10:59 pm
No tag soup. No hacks. A definition list is precisely what a series of images is: each image is a term, and each caption is a definition. Styling that with CSS is, of course, perfectly reasonable. The W3C encourages the use of definition lists for purposes more broad than dictionaries, something not often encountered on websites, after all. There’s absolutely nothing inappropriate about using a definition list for an image/caption pair.
Well, yeah. Who suggested otherwise?
We make VQR available in every country’s iBookstore, as I recall. Unfortunately, Apple doesn’t support many countries yet, but that will presumably improve.
June 28th, 2010 at 10:16 am
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June 30th, 2010 at 3:03 pm
I am quite aware of the loose semantics of
DL, Waldo.July 6th, 2010 at 10:52 am
Just checked out your free sample. It is the best formated ebook for the ipad I’ve seen yet! Do you Indesign to produce your epub? I see in the comments you use the CSS for image formating–it has sent me off on a quest to find out more. Thanks!
July 6th, 2010 at 3:02 pm
Thank you, Lynn. We do not use InDesign–we produce everything by hand, in an HTML editor. That’s not necessarily the best way to do it, it’s just how I like to work, and it’s what works best with our existing magazine workflow. InDesign is capable of producing some very nice-looking EPUBs.
August 17th, 2012 at 5:23 pm
[...] announcing their decision to publish on the iPad specifically, VQR said on their blog: It may seem a bit narrow to produce a version of the publication solely for the iPad—rather than [...]
January 14th, 2013 at 3:40 pm
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