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Originally Posted by DiapDealer
Probably because I prefer it that way (and am surely not alone). I find starting a new chapter with no large top margin (even upwards of 50%) to look as "awful" as you think a top margin of 15% looks. It screams "amateurish" to me.
If anything, I find that vertical spacing in ebooks needs to be exaggerated (compared to pbooks) to be effective--in almost every case. I don't really care about "wasting" screen space. I've never run out of screen in all the time I've been reading ebooks.
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I would not mind a top margin of say 2em. But 15% just doesn't look very good. I have an H2O and with it's 6.8" screen, the chapter header is even farther down than on a 6" screen.
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My question is: why has ereading turned so many readers into armchair typography (and book formatting) experts? 
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What I don't get is why a lot of people want formatting that's completely different than the formatting they got from pBooks. I've not read of people complaining that they want no indents and paragraph spaces from pBooks yet from eBooks they want to deviate from the normal indents with no paragraph spacing.
I do understand why some want left justified because they don't like the gaps that can happen in justified lines with no hyphenation. But what I don't get is why some still want left justified even when there are hyphens.
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Originally Posted by DiapDealer
I just find it ironic that we (the typography "experts") complain more about formatting that is infinitely easier to "fix" than we ever complained about formatting we simply had no chance in hell of "fixing."
I'm also amused by the increasingly popular notion that there was ever some sort of magical, mythical pbook formatting/typography standard that ebooks aren't somehow adhering to. I can pull hundreds of pbooks off my shelves that break the typography "rules" laid down by the books on either side of them. And yet, it's only ebooks that are criticized for their typographic/formatting inconsistency.
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On reason to complain is that something can be done about it by the publisher. For example, if we borrow an eBook from the library, unless we strip the DRM andfix the formatting to what we want, then there's nothing we can do about it. Once a pBook is published and it's on the shelf at the library, there is nothing that can be done to change the formatting. But an eBook can be changed. I've seen a lot of eBooks have their formatting changed. Another issue with this is that we don't get notified for most eBooks that they have been changed and the only way we can find out is to download them again and compare to the previously downloaded copy.