Quote:
Originally Posted by JSWolf
Mobi is not always good enough for fiction. I have an ePub that has an embedded font that's there just for some special characters. If the font used on the Kindle doesn't have this character, then the book won't work as it should.
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For the first decade and a half that I read ebooks they were in plain text files or in .pdb doc files which were plain text compressed for the Palm. There were a few formatted files but such things as font choices and variations are a fairly new thing in ebooks. I never heard of anyone complaining about plain text files in those days. I sure read a lot of books that way.
There are books where tricks are played with the text. A good example of that is Alfred Bester's "The Stars My Destination". He did some very fancy things with text in a couple of places that worked nicely in the context of the story. Most could be duplicated in plain text files but usually they weren't and when they were it was clumsy and not very reliable, depending on the screen size. It was nice to have those effects but the story worked just fine without them. Nothing important was lost. I read it first in paperback with those effects and then years later without them and again since then with them on my Kindle. I can't really say it mattered much.
Barry