Quote:
Originally Posted by teh603
How is the average customer, the "I run windows because everything usually works" guy or girl, going to know whether the code is elegant or not? And how will it influence their decision to buy? I'll be honest, the cover and blurb are more influence to me than the internal coding
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Your average customer won't see any of the code, but he'll notice if the layout is out of whack. If he gets a bad one it would probably influence his decision to buy the next one from that vendor. My girlfriend certainly notices when something is wrong, although she has no idea why it is wrong or what to do about it.
Common culprits are line-height set to large values (or even 1 in one case, I have no idea how that passed even a cursory inspection), hard coded non-relative font sizes (do it only on certain paragraphs for partial non-scaling fun), block quotes with 200px left/right margins which might have looked fine on a 27" screen etc. Even the more elusive hard-coded "color:000" will muck up night mode on lots of readers. I habitually preview epubs when I buy them and touch up the css if necessary, and I've seen a variety of strange coding along the lines mentioned above.
On a side note I don't understand why Smashwords can't provide a template doc file with preset styles, filter away everything but style names in the conversion, and apply their own hand-crafted css. That way they could even offer a choice of visual layouts by replacing the css on the fly when sending the file to the customer. They already offer better placement to "high-quality" documents, but don't give a no-brainer path for achieving that AFAICT.