[ficbot]

Does it bother you to read a book if it is less than perfect-looking? I am curious because I have a few books I liberated from iffy source formats (the eReader decoder produces absolutely awful HTML) and I have been avoiding reading those books in favour of other, prettier ones because it bothers me that after much effort, I cannot get them looking right. And I have some .lit books which look fine on one of my devices and not on others.

I am wondering if I am making too much of a deal about this and wasting too much time trying to make them look perfect. I do have a reader that handles plain text beautifully (and given how cheap ebook readers are becoming, I suspect I will always have a spare one at home that reads plain text). So I am wondering if it might be better to just forget about making everything look perfect. If a book is in a good format and looks wonderful, I'll read it on whatever device. And if it is iffy, I'll just extract the text, save it as a pure text file and leave it at that. I should get a reliable experience with plain text on whatever device, and then I don't have to spend more time and effort making it look pretty in whatever fancy format...

So, what do you think? If a book has iffy formatting, will you read ahead anyway? Or does it bother you enough that you'll go to lengths to fix it? Am I better just throwing in the towel on the iffy ones and reading them as plain old words?