Quote:
Originally Posted by Acousticvillage
I have found the above comments really interesting, and it has prompted me to ask...as a potential buyer of an ereader....are ebooks which are sold and DRM'ed really as properly set out as printed books? The ignorant in me feels that at times an ebook is often the produce of some person scanning a book which comes out at 2 or 3 MB and then gets sold for the same as the paperback version.
Are e-books as "nice" as paperbacks or do they feel just like blocks of text on a screen? I am asking this not to be a troll, but because I have looked at adverts for various e-books - most recently the iRiver 2nd Story. One of the images has the ereader next to a paperback. The text in the paperback looks like a nice font, paragraphs are indented. The e-book shows the sort of pagination and font you would get in an office report. So while the words are there, does it "read" like a book? I'm not sure I think £4 - £15 is a fair price for a 3MB download of a file that looks as if it has simply been copied from a business draft of the original.
I realise you might be able to change fonts, pagination, etc to suit eyesight, and would be grateful for reassurance that people feel they are getting a product specifically designed for them and not just a rudimentary format/version of a better original. I know I know...I am a ditherer and a philistine when it comes to some new technology. I am 52 and I do love my MP3 collection!!! Thanks in advance for any thoughts.
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My 2 cents
GIGO...There are some limits to the individual reader (software) that prevents what you might see as correctly formatted on the PC screen from looking the same (down sized, not scaled ). on your device.... Test what you create.
Toss
re-flow into the mix and what you get may not even be close.
Hike over to the EPUB section of MR and you can see what some of the Wizards can do.
(Hint: That did not happen with click and pray software. TLC, Lots of it, and it shows )
I have massage a number of files so they render on my E-INK screen very close to what was on the page of the paperback on my shelf. The main difference, is that I trim margins to use the whole screen (the device bezel serves as the margins).
In very few cases, have I resorted to a page scan image (jpg) because I just could not render a complex page (usually contained uniquly displayed text).