Supposedly Sony has a thrid party doing all the formatting of books for the Connect store and they charge to have it done. I can make better looking books then Sony sells. This third party is doing one heck of a poor job. The margins are too large. The word spacing is too large. The small print is the wrong size. When you switch the font size to medium, it just makes it look a mess.
I use some of my credit to purchase the bundle from author R. A. Salvatore. These are books from Ballentine. Now given that you have a big name publisher, you'd think the books would be formatted nicely. There are a number of problems. I'll just talk about the first two books.
Book #1:
The cover is just some awful generic cover. I don't even get the cover that is shown on the website.
There is supposed to be an illustrated map. It's not there. There is the mention of the map in the back of the book as it gives credit for it.
The margins are huge. Great waste of screen space.
The spacing between the words is silly. it actually looks sort of like a fix double space between each word.
Because of the margins and word spacing, I am going to use more battery life to read this then I should.
The small size is too small to read comfortably. medium is also probably too small for most. Now if you go to large, it just looks a mess with the word spacing and margins. And for some, it's still going to be too small.
Book 2: Same problems except...
There is a map. That's good right? Wrong. The map is in portrait and given the large margins, the map comes out too small to see clearly. The map should have been in landscape at the full resolution and there would have been no problem at all.
The cover issue is not an issue for all books. But it is for the ones I purchased. The margins and word spacing are even poor on the sample books Sony gives on the reader. Not all books have such a tiny font as the purchased books. Vanguard (one of the supplied books) should be ok for most to read at large and Medium looks ok for most people.
Anyway, to sum up, I can use the tools found at
https://www.mobileread.com and format a book to look like a book, not like a joke. And I do. I've taken some of the ebook I've previously purchased and converted them to LRF and they look good. Small margins, normal word spacing, decent font sizing. So what we need to do is get going and let Sony know we won't take this from them. If this is how they want their books to look, then they need to stop and watch their sales drop as readers come out that support formats that are used in ways as to not look silly.