Why E-Books Look So Ugly. As books make the leap from cellulose and ink to electronic pages, some editors worry that too much is being lost in translation.
Typography, layout, illustrations and carefully thought-out covers are all being reduced to a uniform, black-on-gray template that looks the same whether you’re reading Pride and Prejudice and Zombies or the Federalist Papers. “There’s a dearth of typographic expression in e-books today,” says Pablo Defendini, digital producer for Tor.com, the online arm of science fiction and fantasy publisher Tor Books. “Right now it’s just about taking a digital file and pushing it on to a e-book reader without much consideration for layout and flow of text.” With the popularity of the Kindle and other e-book readers, electronic book sales in the United States have doubled every quarter. The rapid growth of e-books has piqued many publishers’ interest, enabling Amazon to sign all the major publishers and offer more than 275,000 books in its Kindle store.