The Digital Reader

April has begun, which means it’s National Poetry Month here in the US. Most poetry publishers will be doing something to celebrate this month, and FSG (a Macmillan imprint) is no exception.

FSG is repeating the mistake they made last year. As part of National Poetry Month, FSG is sending a new poem everyday. I’m on their mailing  list, and I have to say that the daily poem is a pleasant change from what I usually read.

Unfortunately, FSG sends the poems not as text, but as images. Yes, I understand that formatting is incredibly important, but this causes more problems than it fixes. Let’s start with the obvious. I block pictures in emails as a security measure. (Gmail does this automatically). Actually, last year I sent a couple complaints about not getting the poem before they explained. BTW, both of the email clients I looked at recently block images automatically.

One thing that just occurred to me is that the images FSG sent cannot be read TTS software. I wonder why FSG hates the disabled.

And these images are also difficult to use on a mobile device. The poems do not share a common font family or font size, and for the most part the image resolution is too high for most mobile devices.

Is HTML really too much to ask?