[zelda_pinwheel]

i voted for epub, but my reasons include a lot of technical details which are irrelevant for the purposes of this poll, and also (far more importantly !) the fact that i frequently do a bit of "touch-up" work on my books to make sure they are formatted in a way that i find pleasant to read ; this includes using nice fonts with proper italics versions, defining decent margins, indented paragraphs, etc. i use Sigil to edit the epub file directly ; it's not difficult at all, but it does require a bit of knowledge of css and html code, and it should certainly never be *necessary* to do that to a book you've paid for.

but, that said, i am not sure that there can really be one answer for anyone to this poll, except for those for whom fully-justified text is absolutely indispensable (i happen to prefer left-aligned to machine justification, but i do know i'm in the minority). i say this because apart from the lack of justification support on sony devices and the display of the page numbers in the margins, there is no such thing as one universal "epub formatting" ; the formatting will vary from editor to editor and even from book to book ; one of the great things about epub is precisely that using css style rules you can do quite advanced and varied formatting. however, the sad truth is, apparently most editors have not bothered to learn how to do the formatting properly, and therefore are delivering books which look, frankly, pretty horrible (like vr's example). however, that is not a flaw in the format, it is simply shoddy work on the part of the publisher, and i think anyone who gets a book which sub-par formatting should write to the publisher and let them know you are unhappy with your purchase, and why. it's not that hard to do it right ; there is absolutely no excuse for publishers to be charging people for books that (in some cases) look positively abominable.

Originally Posted by jswinden

Directly from the publisher, the BBeB (LRX) versions typically look more like a printed book than the ePUB versions. But most of what I'm reading in this and other posts about ePUB dislikes is due to two reasons, both of which or easily solved:

(1) The publishers don't know how to format ePUB, much like some web sites look horrible and some look good, most ePUB publishers are terrible at formatting using ePUB. They need to learn what CSS is and how to use it, and Adobe needs to update their ePUB rendering engine to allow full utilization of CSS.

exactly.

(2) The margins and sentence spacing issues are controllable. Currently you need to use a third-party application like Calibre to adjust margins after you have removed the DRM on an ePUB. However, there is no reason why reader firmware cannot allow the adjustment of margins, spacing, font, font-size, font-weight, etc. Most reader applications that have been around for PDAs, smartphones, etc. have these "look and feel" user adjustable options. Take a look at MobiPocket Reader, eReader, Microsoft Reader, etc. for PDAs.

you can also use sigil for this sort of thing, and given the diversity of personal preferences i suspect that a lot of people will continue to modify the formatting of their books even after publishers *do* learn how to make decend epub files. however, it still is frankly inexcusable to find commercial ebooks which are so poorly formatted as to require intervention by the customer to make them look halfway decent, regardless of your personal taste. that said, now that sony has switched over to epub, hopefully there will be sufficient outcry on the part of their customers about the poor formatting to force the publishers to make more of an effort, and about the outdated and imperfect rendering engine used on sony devices, which might motivate sony to put a little work into that. i suspect that if they just added justification support, and the option to mask the marginal page numbers, a lot of people would be a lot happier ; both of those should be trivial to implement.

Originally Posted by XK143

Gotta agree with LaCamera. I just spent an hour fiddling around with the "new" versions of my already-purchased books from the new Reader Store. I don't care for 1) the font, 2) the text being stretched nearly as far as possible to the edge of the screen, and 3) the left-only text justification. I had previously customized my font and it was quite readable. Now I don't think I have that option (yet), let alone any of these other display horrors with Sony's ePUB.

Also, unless I've done something wrong, the font size does not change with the font button on my Reader (a PRS-505), it just makes some kind of page adjustment. I'll have to investigate further. But I'll be keeping the old Sony format on the books I've already purchased and not buy anything else from the Sony Reader Store until I see an improvement or something althogether better. Ick.

those are good examples of bad formatting, alas, although i know that is no comfort to someone who has bought a book which doesn't look good. however they are not inevitable ; it is really easy to define a different font (you can even add a font to your device and add a few rules in the css to use that font for your book), and the margins. also a font which does not change size is probably some kind of formatting mistake. i am not saying that you should have to clean up after the publisher ; i am saying, the publisher should make the effort to learn how to do things right ! as for the lack of justification, it *could* easily be fixed with a firmware update, we'll see if sony ever gets around to that...

Originally Posted by Madam Broshkina

I have put 7 Sony books on the nook. 6 of them have full justification. 5 of these 6 have a space between the paragraphs. The nook does not display the little page numbers on the side. The nook displays the title of the book.

madam b, do you mean that the nook displays running headers with the title ? could you show a photo of that ? it does sound like the epub renderer used on the nook is definitely better than the one used by sony.