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A commonly embedded font that's much too light is Adobe Garamond. It's much too light for eInk and it's still too light for LCD (i.e. iPad or iPhone).
The book The Martian used some free fonts that are just awful. The fonts used as Free Mono, Free Sans, and Free Serif. All of those are just really badly made fonts that are very light. They don't work with eInk or LCD. They don't even work for print.
The problem is that embedded fonts (most of the time) are not checked to make sure they look OK on the screens they will be used with. You need to test the fonts on eInk, a tablet like an iPad, and a cell phone like an iPhone. If they don't work on any of those screens, then the font needs to be scrapped and a different font found to be used (if you actually need a font embedded in this case).
I did recently see a book where Gentium SIL was embedded in case the default font was missing some extended character. The problem was that were this was used didn't look good. It would have been better to use this font for the entire word and not just the one character.
Also, there are issues with Kindles and embedded fonts. Kindles by default do not show embedded fonts. You have to go to the font menu and select Publisher Font (stuipd as sin idea on Amazon's part to make font embedding work that way instead of defaulting to Publisher Font when font(s) are embedded). Also, for the older devices that do not handle KF8, they only get Mobi and Mobi doesn't handle fonts at all. And then if you are not one of the big publishers, there's all kinds of problems getting the book on Amazon with the fonts in tact.
So unless you need the font(s) embedded, don't do it. It just doesn't work in most cases.
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