[howyoudoin]

In my experience of purchasing ebooks and seeing how utterly generic and bland the fonts are in most cases, in comparison to the meticulous care taken for the physical edition of the same books, I have come to believe that there is no consistent science driving the choice of fonts in ebooks. Electronic editions are given the step-child treatment.

I reckon publishers just use whatever font is cheapest for them to license for electronic editions (the reader can change up the fonts on his reading application anyway, right?), or do the bare minimum with no thought towards 'horses for courses'.. In some cases there is a gross misapplication of reading 'science'.

For instance, some ebooks have sans serif fonts when their physical equivalents have serif fonts, which seems to imply an application of the "serif for paper and sans serif for screens" rule (which may or may not be correct by itself). Putting the matter of the validity of the rule aside, this anyway ignores the wisdom that e-readers should be treated like paper, not screens. But then if the statistics show that more ebooks are read on the computer and phone screens than on ereaders, then this perversion of the horses for courses rule does make sense to some extent.