Quote:
Originally Posted by ChaoZ
To me, those improvements sound more technical than stylistic. The font hinting stuff will certainly make fonts smoother, but will not impact how they are spaced, etc. Still, good to hear I guess.
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On the typography issue, there are no readers that do this well. This is partly the fault of the publisher who takes no time at all to proofread a text before making it available, and partly the fault of the software being used to format the text on the reader. The publishers' failings are just due to a simple rush to get the product out the door and get the money flowing in. The software issue is basically because the standards developers haven't yet found the time to be interested in typographical standards.
If typography is important to you, you will not find any ereader that makes you happy at the moment unless you are willing to take the effort to grab the text of the book you want to read and spend a little time formatting it as a PDF designed for the screen size of your reader. Using InDesign or TeX to generate a properly typeset book in PDF form is still the only method to accomplish what you're after. The problem, obviously, is that you give up much of the functionality of an e-Book: you cannot easily change the font size, etc.
I believe eventually the formatting standards (ePub, etc.) for ereaders will catch up to the nuances of proper typography, but it will still be a few years. Publishers won't pay any attention to proofreading their books to acceptable standards as long as people keep buying them and not returning them. If everyone demanded refunds when they found a badly formatted book or a bunch of idiotic errors in the text, publishers would start paying attention to these details overnight. As it stands right now, though, if these details are important to you and you don't want to spend the time to fix them yourself, then the ereading world is definitely not going to provide you with a good experience at the moment and I would recommend staying with print books for now.