[DNSB]

Originally Posted by speakingtohe

I think making them nice and shiny is a good thing if it enhances your enjoyment of the book.

Sadly, not so much nice and shiny. The best way to describe my preferred format is vanilla and dull. Less to get in the way of my enjoying the book.

Originally Posted by speakingtohe

For me it doesn't so much. I will remove page numbers and format the way I like a book to appear and fix up obvious ugly things, but I don't care about the underlying CSS unless it gives me huge line spacing etc.

Whereas I have a boilerplate CSS that gives me what I want. And enough saved regex's for Sigil to make changing most ebooks over a 10-15 minute chore.

Originally Posted by speakingtohe

Many old PD books I have do not go well on the Kobo. Probably there was no epubcheck when someone kindly scanned them in, probably there was no epub even. And I have even encountered newer books that have problems uniquely on the Kobo readers. Most of these can be fixed in under a minute so this is what I do

I did 'fix' a few books with Sigil, but found myself reading while fixing and couldn't seem to stop and I don't like that. It seems to spoil the book for me.
I rarely reread and it felt like I had read the book already even if only 25% or so.

So now I fix what I can do fairly quickly (under an hour perhaps, but preferably under 5 minutes) and if it is not that simple I put it aside until I have no grass to watch growing.

Generally, I allow 15 minutes maximum to clean up a book. As for reading while fixing, I spent several years doing proof-reading as a part time job. About as boring a job as you can find but I learned how to scan for errors and not actually read the text.

I do re-read books after a period of time. Some of them I enjoy more the second or third time around. Others are definitely in the "cold pancakes and no honey" category.

Originally Posted by speakingtohe

I like the look of nice shiny books, with things like caps drop etc. but rarely notice such things while reading after the first page or so.

I've added fleurons, vignettes, drop caps and other fancy formatting to ebooks when requested to do so. For my own reading, forget it. For me, if the words aren't worth reading, making the page pretty is like slapping a coat of paint on a rustbucket in the hopes it'll look new.

Originally Posted by speakingtohe

In fact I am soooo lazy I will look up the odd missing word or paragraph in calibre if the Kobo refuses to show it to me even when I change the font but leave the book as is.

Still if you reread a lot or find the odd extra line break etc., disturbs your enjoyment it is a good thing for you to do.

Part of my current employment is spending time being there just in case in the middle of the night. Editing ebooks is one of the things I do to keep myself awake. Beats endless games of solitaire.

Regards,
David