I’ve wondered at the poor formatting too. I’ve variously blamed the ePub file, the way the rendering engines on different brands of readers work, the hardware and possibly even the source of our books but I think the real problem is a lack of adequate tools.
For the last few months I’ve been using a Pocket Pro. Comparing the way it renders ePub books to the way the Sony renders the same file is instructive.
The Pocket Pro displays most ePubs with fully justified margins. I thought my Sony 505 lacked full justification until I re-downloaded a book I had been reading in LRX format (William Broad’s excellent study of the Delphic Oracle). In LRX the 505 displayed a well formatted book with fully justified left and right margins. When Sony switched to ePub I returned to their store and re-downloaded it. When I opened it on the 505, the first thing I got was the spinner (it’s the time-delay notice Sony Readers use) and the message: “Reformatting”. I had never seen that before. I was surprised when it finally came up with fully formatted margins and the same attractive formatting the book had in LRX.
Time for a test. I’d already loaded
The Elements of Style Illustrated, a generic ePub from Shortcovers, on both readers so I decided to compare. This one is fully justified on the Pocket Pro and left justified on the Sony: no spinner or re-formatting this time. But the margins are the same width on both the Sony and the Pocket Pro, not a percentage of screen width. At about 10 millimeters these margins are too wide on either screen. They make the book hard to read on both but especially on the smaller, 5-inch Pocket Pro screen. However, the illustrations in this book render as fast as text pages on the Pocket Pro and so slowly on the Sony I thought it had hung. Pocket Pros use a new Epson controller that wasn’t available two years ago, which probably explains the Pocket Pro’s faster refresh.
As a second test I loaded the Oracle book on the Pocket Pro to compare. As expected, the illustrations loaded quickly without interrupting the reading experience. Both had some formatting errors such as missing first letters of each chapter which I guess were drop caps in the pBook that they failed to carry over into ePub. But the Pocket Pro had new flaws with this book: it added extra blank lines in places the Sony did not. For example, Sony did this:
TWO
Doubters
Pocket Pro did it like this:
TWO
Doubters
Obviously this book lacks the relative formatting needed to suit it for any size screen. Device independence is one of the most important of ePub’s potential features.
A style sheet might help but I really think the bigger problem is the lack of really good page layout tools for ePub. Giants like MS Word and WordPerfect support PDF publishing but neither can create even a simple ePub file. Where are the automated, instinctive professional layout tools? Once these tools are available style sheets make sense.
The people laying out these books understand what they want to do but I think that as long as publishers have to hand edit format codes we will not see better formatted books. They already have to deal with the complexity of the different implementations of Adobe Mobile and the differences in hardware.