Paulo, thank you for your comments and suggestions. I'll try and answer as best I can.
CSS classes. I use Word 2007 to intially format the book, thus giving me a .docx file and then use Calibre to convert the book to epub format. I
think the reason so many classes are created by Calibre is because I'm trying to replicate the original books as much as possible and a lot of different paragraph styles are generated as a result. This is especially noticable in poetry and blank verse. Since I haven't made any attempt to optimize or otherwise tinker with the different styles, the result is what you see in the stylesheet. Not great, but I don't think the overhead has any negative impact on ebook readers. I don't doubt it makes any competent epub guru cringe though.
I guess a good exercise for me would be to review all the volumes later and see what optimization/clean-up could be done with Sigil or a similar editor. To that end I'll use your tips as a guide for things that should be changed. Thank you for pointing them out.
Font sizes. I generally only use 2 sizes, one for headers and the other for general text. A third size is sometimes used for footnotes depending on the context. It didn't occur to me that using a specific font size in Word would result in fixed sizes on ebook readers, I assumed the reader would resize appropriately as selected by the person using the device. I'll most definitely investigate that further and attempt to make the books more reader friendly.
Footnotes. For the most part I've put the notes inline at the end of the appropriate paragraphs. This also works well for plays. For poetry and blank verse I used a different approach, either placing the notes at the end of the poem/passage or hyper-linking them. This seemed a more reasonable way of doing it since some works have upwards of a thousand footnotes that would completely clutter and obscure the story (the Divine Comedy comes to mind). Poetry, to me, would be unreadable otherwise.
You mention the lack of a 'back' button on the Kobo, I wonder if that is true for other ebook readers as well. I
thought Calibre created a back link within the footnote so this wouldn't cause problems. Of course I may be completely wrong.
Anyway, you are definitely not teaching me to suck eggs
, I'm very much a novice at this and appreciate all suggestions and criticisms, especially when it helps me better understand the inner workings of ebooks.
Thank you and cheers,
George