[donovan1983]

Originally Posted by netseeker

So do you return a paperback if the hardcover edition uses another font, another paper size, other margins, other paragraph spaces or another layout in general? Why should eBooks look exactly the same as printed books? Different "screen" sizes, different technologies, different possibilities, different reading experience.

There is a big difference between "formatting errors" and "i want exactly the same formatting as in the printed edition X".

This puts my thoughts a bit more succinctly.

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Then there's the other side of the coin, where the ebook can't mirror the design of the pbook.

For example, I did design and print production, back when the tools of the trade were T-squares, eXacto knives, rubber cement, and typeset galleys off a photo-typositor. DTP didn't exist, because the hardware it could run on didn't, and wouldn't for years. I still have design volumes in my library like _Production for the Graphic Designer_ and _Design With Type_. Many of these use multi-column layouts and formatting that can't be done on ebook reader devices. To reproduce the book as intended, you would have to do it as PDF, and you wouldn't want it to re-flow to fit a smaller device screen.

Some devices are more constrained than others. My principal reader is a Palm OS PDA. Palm OS has a set number of slots for fonts, with names like Standard, Bold, Large, and Large Bold. By default, these are mapped to fonts in device ROM. I converted some True Type fonts to a format Palm OS can display, and I've done things like customize the fonts Mobi Reader for Palm OS uses for text with a hack that maps one of my custom fonts into the slot where Palm OS looks for the standard text font. But that's global for all MobiPocket volumes. It won't reproduce what fonts the original book used, because it can't.

As the hardware gets cheaper and more powerful, I expect this issue to fade (though not got go away entirely.) Meanwhile, I do the best I can on formatting when creating an ebook, and the type geek in me mourns what I can't do.

With a large enough screen, like 14" or so, PDF might finally be practical on an e-ink device. Not to mention high resolution, on the order of 1536x2048 for 14". Although something much higher, around 300ppi, would be even better. So long as it uses a good PDF renderer, it should mirror the printed page exactly.

The current ebook formats are a bit limited and that's intentional. Mobipocket is especially limited since it uses a subset of what is today a rather primitive version of HTML. The Peanut Press/eReader format, although very different in markup, is similarly limited. Both formats are more than 10 years old, too, and were developed for devices where you had one font with maybe a few sizes. I was actually quite shocked when I found out that Amazon uses Mobipocket as the ebook format for the Kindle. EPUB will hopefully allow more fine-grained control over a book's layout, but it will still be constrained by being a reflowable format which means it will still not be suitable for certain content.

Originally Posted by Anarel

You say that it's a matter of taste and I wholly disagree; the error might not bother you so much, and other people have stated that they can look past it, but whether you can ignore it or not, it is still very much an error and should not be so.

I included in the first post an example of many other ebooks in which there is no difference between the print and ebook edition; it should be the same for all ebooks.

To me, I very much prefer that I have control over how an ebook is displayed. I don't necessarily want nor expect an ebook to match the printed version. The books I've purchased so far from Amazon I have converted to EPUB format so I can read them in Stanza on my iPhone since I have it set up to display books exactly how I want them, not how the publisher may want them to display. It makes it easier and more enjoyable for me to read. Times New Roman text that is fully justified with no spacing between paragraphs is fine for a paper novel but unbearable for me to read for any length of time on a low-resolution display. Not to mention the Kindle for iPhone app is very primitive and quite buggy, not even being able to display its own native format correctly. Not to mention I've been a bit spoiled by ebooks since I've been purchasing them for 8 years so I've long since gotten used to having them displayed my way.

In a few years maybe this will be less of an issue and we can both have our ways with ebooks. I don't know much about the publishing industry, but I'm sure it would help a lot if the electronic version was a bit more coordinated with the print version. If a publisher would distill the LaTeX or PostScript file that is used for the print copy directly to an EPUB file, it would help the major issues you mentioned with line spacing and such and give output that is more closely matched to the printed version. I imagine that currently the original manuscript is used for the electronic version by many publishers rather than the print-formatted version, which means major formatting differences will be an inherent problem. This means Amazon will have to adopt EPUB, too.