Quote:
Originally Posted by treadlightly
I agree, I want ebooks to look the way I want too. In my mind there is no reason why the device couldn't modify the stylesheet settings. If you want to modify yours on your computer, then great, you would select "Use ebook style" on your device. But for those who don't want to do any pre-processing, the settings should be able to be configured by the device. Some of them can be modified presently, why not more of them? One of the biggest reasons that I use an ereader is because I want to modify the display to my liking. So why should the ereader restrict this in any way? One of the reasons I chose Kobo was because it gives the greatest flexibility in this, and the more flexibility that is added will make it even better.
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I fear you have an over-simplistic view of how epub css styling works. Overriding styles selectively with 100% success for every epub is just not possible (at least in 2013). There are too many idiotic ways in which epub creators create the css styling and markup the html text content. There are currently only 2 ways to guarantee the precise styling you want.
The first is to manually tweak the internal css for every epub. It works perfectly but is a total PITA because it's time-consuming and you have to learn stuff.
The other way is for the reading app to completely ignore internal css and let the user set everything from the device. This may sound terrific -- and it is for some people. FBReader and CoolReader can do this, both apps work on the PocketBook range of e-ink readers and all Android devices. What frequently happens with this approach (unless things have improved in the last couple of years) is that, depending on the epub, some display features get lost, and no amount of customisation on the reader can reproduce them e.g scenebreaks, centre- and right-alignment, text indented on both sides, inline font-size changes (small-caps & dropcaps). This can be very irritating to those who like their epubs 'just-so'.
Everything else is a compromise somewhere between the two extremes -- and compromises never suit all of the people all of the time.