I’ve seen two principal schools of thought surrounding covers for e-books.

Theory One: Book covers don’t really matter much any more.

Theory Two: Covers for e-books still matter a lot. They matter in a different way, and we’re not quite sure what makes it different, but they certainly do matter. (more…)

Reading the New York Times article about the e-book version of Julia Child’s classic Mastering the Art of French Cooking you’d think that a milestone had been reached in the struggle for high-quality e-books. This 1961 book is one of the classics, and the publisher had a tradition to uphold.

Cookbooks have not been a big hit as e-books and part of the problem is assumed to be their complex formatting. Knopf in fact abandoned its first attempt to create an e-book from Mastering because the “technology was not available” to recreate the book’s “distinctive two-column format.”

The story of the Mastering the Art of French Cooking e-book affords an opportunity to look at the current state of e-book creation and the strengths and limitations of the e-book formats in use today. I call this tale Mastering the Art of e-Book Formatting. (more…)

1. Read the article in today’s New York Times. It’s about a remarkable new structure in Miami’s South Beach.

2. Go to the new building’s web site, and click on this graphic:

3. After the well-designed flash images flash by, take time to interact with every graphic you can click on. Unlike so many sites that feature strong design elements, each click returns a useful image, a useful piece of information, or takes you to your next destination on the site.

4. Now pause to ponder.
What have you just encountered?
What does this mean to you?

5. Now answer yeah or nay:

(i) Does this look like a great building?
By great I mean audacious and original, fun yet functional.
Does it reveal to you something about the character of Miami Beach, whether you feel positive or negative.
(I’m guessing that you don’t develop strong feelings about most new building in the city where you live.)

(ii) Is this a great web site?
By great I mean audacious and original, fun yet functional.

(iii) Can you imagine accomplishing what this site accomplishes in any other medium?
Direct mail would just cheapen the image, unless a lot of money was spent on developing the piece.
A magazine could capture some of the bright images, but would be challenged to convey the motion.
Would you sit still through “the movie”?

(iv) Finally: Do you feel like you want to celebrate your next big birthday/anniversary/rebirth at 1111 Lincoln Road in Miami Beach, FL?

In Vancouver the public transit is operated by Translink. There are lots of good things to say about Translink. The buses are clean and fairly punctual and the drivers are generally friendly and helpful, sometimes exceptionally so. The routes are well-planned and the service frequent. The SkyTrains are a marvel of efficiency and comfort. The train service to the airport, launched during this year’s Vancouver Winter Olympics works brilliantly. It takes you to the airport in record time and the price is a bargain.

Translink’s website sucks.

Of course “sucks” is relative. It doesn’t suck as bad as many other public transportation websites. And it does some things well. But it sucks in two important categories:

1. Passwords.

Unlike nearly every other website in the universe, your password for Translink must include not just letters, not just letters and numbers, but “must contain a minimum of 8 characters, at least 1 non alpha numeric character, and at least 1 numeric character.”

Then you must enter a Google reCAPTCHA. I’ve written about these sometimes-nifty check-if-you’re-human utilities before. More recently I’ve been collecting some crazy samples of inscrutable reCAPTCHAs. Here are a few from my collection, blended into a single image:

My reCAPTCHA Collection

An outcome of Translink’s registration process is that it took me about 20 minutes last week to register, and so I was 20 minutes late for the launch of Daniel Francis’s new book. Yes, if I’d just read the fine print I’d have registered more quickly. But, like you, I’ve now registered for hundreds of sites, I no longer read the fine print, and by default register with an alpha-numeric password, which nearly always works. I was left wondering why a bus schedule website would insist on such draconian security, and posed that question in a comment form on site.

2. Typing your address to find the next bus.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Many of the streets in Vancouver are numbered: the major east-west thoroughfares number from First Ave. to 73rd Ave. But don’t try typing those numbers as words, and don’t forget whether the address is east or west. The form on the site tries to make an informed guess. In my experience it usually just gets baffled, or guesses wrong.

Say What?

Then when you finally do enter the right address the system looks for every possible combination of bus routes that can bring you near your destination, with the default sort being total travel time in a moving vehicle.

And the best choice is?

So, nobody’s perfect, and few websites are. But can’t these problems be fixed?

To Translink’s credit, a genuine human telephoned me yesterday to respond to my criticism about the password. I was told that the reason for the complex password is that two years from now the site will link to payment information, at which point the extra security will prove valuable. I did not ask why Translink does not follow S.O.P. and ask customers to change their passwords if and when it becomes necessary to do so.

I did take advantage of the human to ask about the buggy address recognition system. I was told that the original programming for the site was very expensive, and would now be prohibitively expensive to fix. Many aspects of the site work well, so why throw the baby out with the bathwater?

Hmm. Interesting rhetoric. It’s possibly a plausible argument to make to folks who complain about how tough life can be living in Western countries. “Well, try living in Africa,” some respond.

I don’t think the rhetoric applies to websites. If a core function doesn’t function the programmer should be asked to fix it. Someone at Translink signed off on this project perhaps without fully testing it first.

And if all else fails, there’s always tactic #2 for those who complain about the usability of your site. “Well, it works fine for me,” I was told yesterday. “I don’t know why you’re having a problem.”

The future of Adobe’s Flash format is murky. I first glanced at Flash technology’s murk when Steve Jobs launched an attack last April. Jobs stated that “Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice…. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short.”

Jobs pointed to HTML5, a W3C proposed standard, as the preferred alternative. The W3C released a new working draft of HTML5 on October 12. The development work is continuing at a near-feverish pace (by W3C standards of developing standards).

HTML5 is hot. In a May blog entry I covered Scribd’s dramatic commitment to HTML5 in lieu of Flash.

In September Computerworld offered:

The W3C is investigating the possibility of incorporating voice recognition and speech synthesis interfaces within Web pages. A new incubator group will file a report a year from now summarizing the feasibility of adding voice and speech features into HTML, the W3C’s standard for rendering Web pages. AT&T, Google, Microsoft and the Mozilla Foundation, among others, all have engineers participating in this effort.

Source: Varologic SEO Blog

But not all the news is positive. ZDNet reported this week that Facebook found that Flash still outperforms HTML5 for video on mobile devices (albeit modestly), “a zinger of sorts” in the Flash war.

And InfoWorld found a W3C official who stated that despite the hype, the HTML5 specification isn’t yet ready due to interoperability issues.

I guess I’m just the show-me tech guy. Here’s all I know about the technical limitations of Flash: