[Solitaire1]

Originally Posted by Ripplinger

I prefer no spacing because that's the way paper books are so that's what I'm used to. I have never seen any paper book have spacing between paragraphs, not once.

Spacing between paragraphs is required on forums because none of them are set up to auto-indent. I've seen a few public domain ebooks like that and I hate reading them, I have to edit them to no space between paragraphs and indented.

I really wonder how anyone got used to spacing between paragraphs unless they have only been brought up on ebooks and not paper books at all?

I think a factor in there being no indents and blank lines between paragraphs in on-line documents is due to HTML. Original HTML automatically puts a blank line after a paragraph and it has no indenting tag. There are ways to avoid the blank line after a paragraph (such as by using a line break tag rather than an opening and closing paragraph tag between each paragraph) and to insert an indent (such as using non-breaking spaces at the beginning of a paragraph). One of the reasons that CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) was developed was to give web designers control over the formatting of documents, control that HTML doesn't provide.

Originally Posted by BWinmill

There's a simple enough reason for that: it would increase the amount of paper required for printing, sometimes by a significant amount. This is not a concern for ereaders.

I agree. I did a test using a Project Gutenberg version of "A Christmas Carol" I formatted for my ereader and removed the line spacing between the paragraphs (0.1 inches) and used a 1/4" paragraph indent. That action reduced the page count from 235 pages to 219 pages (a reduction of almost 7 percent).

Originally Posted by leftright

Surely the integrity of the authors style and intent should be retained irrespective of the medium used to read.

Like music, does one preserve the integrity of the artists intent or does one remix the content when "duplicating" the music?.

Unfortunately, sometimes music is modified without an input by the artist. An example of this is the music of The Beatles. According to articles in the magazine "The Beatles" (published by I-5 Publishing), The Beatles albums released in the U. S. before "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" were significantly modified from the original U. K. albums released without the approval of The Beatles.

Not only were the albums released with different track configurations in the U. S. but the tracks themselves were modified without the approval of The Beatles. For many people, it was not until the music of The Beatles was released on CD that we in the U. S. got to hear their music the way The Beatles intended.

Sorry to get a little off-topic, returning to the main topic:

As far as paragraph spacing versus indenting, I prefer a space between the paragraphs but indenting is also fine with me. However, I dislike paragraph spacing and indenting together since each makes the other redundant.