[Anak]

Originally Posted by PeterT

A couple of points..

• Kobo (along with other eBook sellers) are just that; SELLERS. They do NOT format the material, they take what is supplied to them by PUBLISHERS. Yes; there is some automated markup done to convert a book from standard ePub to kepub format.
• It would help people look into the problem if you would actually supply titles of books exhibiting issues; my cursory look through some Gateway previews did not show such issues.

Originally Posted by DNSB

I would agree with PeterT here, Kobo is a seller of ebooks not a producer. Should we blame the local bookseller when an error is found in a deadtree book? Or place the blame on the people who produced the book? While it is possible that some of the issues might be an artifact of the process to Kobofy the epub, I haven's seen that happen in any of the .kepubs I have read.

Yes and no.
I agree, don't blame Kobo if it is a formatting issue that happen with regular epubs. In that case Kobo is only the vendor and has nothing to do with/influence on the layout of the book. Most likely only the publisher is to blame but may also be an artifact of the used renderer. Nevertheless, as most e-ink devices use the same Adobe Reader Mobile renderer publishers should be familiar with the existing artifacts/problem areas and work around them or avoid them completely.

I disagree if the formatting issue (or any other issue) is caused by the conversion from a regular epub to a kobofied kepub. This conversion is very rudimental.
Partly, I do understand Kobo uses a "catch all" strategy to kobofy epubs as books can be coded (CSS) by publishers in many different ways to get the desired output which is in most cases mimicking the original layout of the physical book.
If any kepub conversion issue occurs then only Kobo is to blame and not the publisher. It simply means that the kepub feature (it is a Kobo feature to distinguish them from other brands or vendors) isn't very well thought through as several quite universal "known conversion issues" happens with to many epubs. Meaning it's not an uncommon issue.

E.g. A very familiar issue is the empty line between paragraphs (p-tag) that distorts the original layout from the publisher and does not contribute to any specific Kobo reader feature. The GUI should have had a fix option for it. A "show/hide empty line between paragraphs".
BTW, this is not ment to be a "I like" or "you like" discussion. An empty line between paragraphs should only happen at the same locations where the physical book has them (the publisher has coded these in the internal CSS/HTML of the book and these empty lines are most likely to occur at quite logical postions in a book or text and do serve a purpose, e.g mark scene beak. Any code added by Kobo that overrules or ignores these positions is just wrong. By default the GUI should have, as I mentioned earlier, a "show/hide empty line between paragraphs".

Kobo tries to lure their customers to their eco system and one way to to this is by offering a kepub version of a book and promising readers additional features that regular epubs do not offer. I don't blame them for doing or trying this. But I do question if this is the right or desired way.

Other e-reader manufacturers or brands offer similar options with regular epubs without the need of a conversion or special version of a epub.
Common added features are:
• install and use custom fonts (sideloaded fonts)
• change thickness and sharpness of the font (Kobos TypeGenius feature)
• text alignment
• margin control (left, right and top and bottom)
• use ligatures
• ignore internal CSS
• and more…

The main difference is that other manufacturers are capable to "inject" or parse specific code into the - regular, non modified - epub rendering process at the hardware side to "free" these added reader options where Kobo chose to do it on the software side (offering a kepub version).
And there is no denying that this comes at a cost: several layout issues which the user has no control over.