Quote:
Originally Posted by fjtorres
+1
There are two basic schools of thought on ebook rendering:
One school believes ebooks *must* be rendered as the *publisher* chooses. They favor pdf or, if forced away from pretend-paper, locked-down epubs. It's *their* book.
The other school believes the consumer is paying the freight so they should have the option to read the ebook *their* way, regardless of what the publishing overlords may prefer.
I favor maximum end-user typographical controls and don't care a stuffed fig whether it displays "properly" or not as long as it is clean and readable. I favor Coolreader because its rendering starts with the embedded styles and then overlays *my* choices. It properly handles nested TOCs and it lets me disable the satus bar and use the entire screen for text.
It's *my* reader, *my* eyeballs, *my* money.
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I don't think it's quite as black & white as this. It's not a case of displaying EXACTLY as the publisher decided but of retaining some of the 'nicer' styling features we got used to in p-books, e.g. scene-breaks, blockquotes, Dropcaps, SmallCaps, centred text etc...
It's a long time since I used FBReader (on my PocketBook 360), but I seem to remember it completely obliterated the styling niceties. I never did get round to trying CoolReader. It's quite possible both apps have improved a lot.
I've attached a one-page epub containing various typical styles found in epubs. The default Sony app displays all styling with no problems. I've also attached a screencap of what it looks like on a Sony 650 (I didn't use the T1 because I don't have a screencap app for it, but I'm pretty sure I can make it look exactly the same.)
Edit: I should add that I have used a customised font, not the Sony default.
If anyone can spare the time I would love to know how close to the original you can get using one of the Android reading apps. I haven't rooted my T1 yet as I haven't seen a 'killer app' which will tip me over the edge
In addition, for any Calibre fans who use either the Catalog or News features (both highly styled epubs), are any of the Android reading apps practical at all?