From Priya Ganapati at Wired:

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, Twilight 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. Though still a very small percentage of the overall book industry, sales of e-books touched $15.5 million in the first quarter of the year, up from $3.2 million the same quarter a year ago. By contrast, the printed book market sales in North America alone was nearly $14 billion in 2008. More…