[pstjmack]

As a longtime reader of poetry on ebooks, as well as a poet who does his own ebook layouts, I struggled for years with the line break problem. The best format I found for dealing with it was the now pretty defunct eReader/PDB format for Palm readers. Microsoft Reader also managed pretty well, but ePub struggles very badly with this. Kindle copes better, mind, but the limited font resizing and formatting options on the Kindle reading software compared to some ePub clients also make it less than ideal.

I would never read poetry on a device that forces line breaks into the text that aren't there in the original. There's no point trying to read a poem if you don't know where the original line breaks came.

In my experience, you can code in ePub to a point where you can get workable poetry text. It just takes hard work and the right techniques. It's also not helped by inconsistency between different ePub reading clients, where some will register soft returns properly, and others won't and just run text together. Maybe the best option, alas, is really to jump in with Kindle and be devoured by the Amazon monster.

And yes I would be happy with an ebook that told me it was best read in landscape. If this approach works for games and other apps and software, why not for ebooks? But the ability to reflow is critical for me. It's all that really differentiates an ebook from reading Web pages onscreen. So I am far more in favour of solutions that can square the circle between preserving the original layout and allowing reflow of text. It can be done, IMHO. PDF, alas, just ends up all too often as unreadably small on eReaders, as well as being very rigid and hard to navigate through - basically, not worth the tradeoff.