iBooks on iPad Default Font Size

[belden]

I realize this may be a random and kind of weird question but I wanted to see people's opinions and answers. I just got the new iPad with the retina display and am thinking about using iBooks as my main ereader. I had tried with the original iPad but preferred using an e-ink Kindle for the main reason that nearly every book displayed the text and font at a uniform size from book to book that was formatted perfectly for the screen on the Kindle, i.e. there weren't lines of text broken in half by misplaced line breaks and indented or otherwise non-standard text displayed where it looked like it would in a printed book. On the iPad I would have to adjust font settings and it looked much worse but with the higher resolution of the new iPad, this isn't an issue.

So here's my question, is there a universally accepted font size that should be considered the default for epub files? I typically use the copyright pages at the beginning of the book as my guide. I zoom out and keep looking to see the point at which the text fits onto a single line without any stray words on lines by themselves.

I have attached two picture examples to show what I mean. The first shows the poor formatting I mean. See how words like "U.S.A." and "Australia" show up by themselves with line breaks after them. The second show the font size reduced to the point where it all fits.

This is obvious in many other places in text as well, where there is text which has been placed into shapes like boxes on the right side of the page and it doesn't display properly if the font is too large or lists where certain items have different indentation because they run too long.

The reason this is a problem is because with the new iPad, as evidenced by the pictures the text can get very small. Given the choice between small, properly-formatted text and larger but not what the publisher intended text, I'll leave it small. So again, what I really want to know is whether iBooks in particular has a default zoom which is the correct level (i.e. zoom all the way as small as possible and then increase three times) or whether it doesn't? And more in general, should I give up on even trying because there isn't a standard and just read with whatever level looks best?