Quote:
Originally Posted by tompe
Well, in most cases people do not know what is best for reading. People for example usually do not notice that it is hard to read with lines that are longer than around 60 characters.
The typographical rules of thumb are there for a reason. It is to make it easier to read. It is not there to allow people to read in a sub-optimal way.
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I'm not sure why you're using the line-length issue as your example here? As far as I know, no epub formatters routinely artificially restrict the user from setting the font size so small that a line will be unmanageably long to read. It's not really an issue in this context.
I'm talking about fonts, line spacing, margins, etc. I've seen ebooks with ridiculously large line spacing, for no reason at all. Huge margins, again for no good reason, just because someone figured that a six-inch screen should look from a distance a bit like a trade paperback page. (I consider my bezel to be my "margin", and set a small but non-zero margin for the screen itself.) And speaking of fonts: every PDF I've seen that was purportedly laid out for a six-inch screen had a font in which the lines were so thin that the book was impossible to comfortably read. As shalym says, justification that works with small font sizes breaks badly with text enlarged for those with visual impairment, who are a huge and growing ebook market. And so on, and so on.
And no, my ebooks don't look like a completely unformatted text document.
There are paragraph indents (the size that works for me), a small margin, an appropriate line spacing that is readable but doesn't waste space, a font carefully tuned by me to be optimally readable for my eyes on a small eink screen, glyphs at scene breaks as inserted by the publisher, yadda yadda.