One thing I never read, if possible: ebooks. That said, in these strange times, they are what folks need — and, because these are strange times, it’s causing problems. Ars Technica has the story.
How Adobe InDesign Took Over
Way back in the day — that is, before the mid-nineties — publishing on the Mac consisted of Quark XPress. Okay, sure, there was Aldus Publisher and some bit players, but it was basically Quark or nothing. I used Quark in book design back then, and … basically hated it.
I was one of the early adopters of InDesign, dragging co-workers and companies along with me, as part of my time working at Tropicana. Not the juice cartons themselves — those were done in Illustrator — but the ancillary stuff, like marketing materials, sell sheets, and so on.
AppleInsider ran a piece a while ago (I’d missed it, initially), “How Adobe InDesign took over publishing with Steve Jobs’ help.” Good history for those of you who don’t know about those days or want a trip down memory lane, best summarized, in fact, by a commenter on the article: “This covers an interesting arc. Adobe went from an ambitious upstart trying to unseat an established, albeit arrogant, standard, to becoming the arrogant standard.”
“The 2010s were supposed to bring the ebook revolution. It never quite came.”
From Vox:
“Publishing spent the 2010s fighting tooth and nail against ebooks. There were unintended consequences.”
Fascinating look at the how’s and why’s of traditional books vs. ebooks. (Needless to say, I’m firmly on the side of the traditional printed version.)