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Originally Posted by 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'.
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It depends on the Reader or program/app and the available fonts. The thing is with say a Kobo, I can sideload the font(s) I want to have available. So the choice is mine from whatever fonts I have available. With a Kindle (non-jailbroken), the only way to install the font(s) of your choice is to embed. Some apps use the installed fonts on the device and some also allow you to sideload. You can also embed as well if need be.
So no, eBooks are not the step-child. I've seen some eBooks with the same fonts embedded that were used in the pBook and without any modification, the main reading font is too light on an eInk screen. One common embedded font that doesn't work as is is Adobe Garamond Pro because it is too light. I can sort out that problem fairly easily, but most people cannot.
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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.
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I find sans-serif as the base font to make the eBook have a cheap feel. Like the publisher and/or author didn't give a damn about the book.
One of the worst eBooks I have seen is
The Martian. It has FreeSerif, FreSansOblique, FreeSans, FreeMonoOblique, & FreeMono embedded. These fonts are all much too light for an eInk screen. The worst of the bunch is FreeMono. The book makes some extensive use of monospace and the font embedded is very very light. This is a case of the publisher not seeing how these fonts look on an eInk screen. They look awful and I had to dump them because they make the eBook rather hard to read.
I've made a version of Charis SIL that I call ChareInk that I think looks very good on eInk sceens. It is available for free on MR.
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=184056