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Old 06-26-2016, 01:29 AM   #1
JustinThought
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Can We Talk? About E-Readers?

Hello, everyone, I'd like to talk seriously about e-readers, and what they're doing to our reading habits.

I have a fairly extensive collection of e-books from various authors, and I have always thought that it would be logical that each of the books from each author would look best if they displayed consistently. Now, whether you're finding your e-books from an online resource for little or no cost; or buying them from the big publishing houses, you're likely to get a devil's-brew of formatting, ranging from the elegant to what I call "word soup" with no formatting or chapter breaks at all. Therefore, I undertook the process of trying to reformat some of my more favorite ones into a consistent format.

Now, my pick-up app for reading is Moon+ Reader because I like the formatting options it offers. I also often make notes within the book, and Moon+ offers this feature. The app also provides reading stats, and keeps track of those books that have already bitten the dust.

Now, I noticed that much of my careful formatting was lost in Moon+, and I began to be curious about what the display would look like on other e-reader apps. So I went to the Play Store, and I loaded another e-reader that I had seen recommended in this forum; then loaded several more by using the scientific selection process of choosing the first one at the bottom of the Play Store screen labeled "People who loaded this also loaded..."

Then, I slapped the ebook that I created to hold the formats that I use regularly in my upgrading process onto my venerable Samsung tablet, and started comparing the results. I was aghast! I discovered that there was absolutely no consistency across software platforms whatsoever. One e-reader would give fairly good results on one of my favorite formats; and look horrible when displaying another.

Then I began to be curious about how these favorite formats would look on some of the dedicated e-readers discussed in this forum. I realized that to find the answer to that question, I would have to invest in a couple-hundred different e-readers. I tapped my rich uncle for the funds to do this, but he is mouldering away in a debtors prison in Argentina, and wasn't able to help me, and I don't have the skills (or desire) to create a go-fund-me site to finance this project. (I'd probably use the money to spend a couple of weeks--or months--or the rest of my life--in idyllic bliss in some out-of-the-way spot like Cancun if it were successful anyway.)

Instead, along with posting screenshots of the results of my research so far, I'm also making my format book available to you, whom I assume already have one of those aforementioned dedicated e-readers. I'd love it if you could take screenshots of the format that you get and post them here. Maybe from this, others could be guided in their choice of their next e-reader.

One thing I have concluded from this little project (hobbies and other time-wasters sound SO much more important and meaningful if you call them "projects") is that there needs to be an establishment of some kind of standards for e-readers, just as the electronics industry managed to develop a standard for video recorders way back in the '80s; just to prevent us from having to choke down the occasional dinner of word soup.

Anybody want to post their results?

Now, if I can get this forum to cooperate with me, I'm going to post the screenshots for the various readers for each of the more important formats I have developed, below. They are, in order, a screenshot of how it looks in Sigil; next a screenshot of the presentation within Calibre on my computer. Not surprisingly, those are pretty much the way I wanted the pages to look. Following that, in order, are the results for Aldiko Reader, Cool Reader, FBReader, Gitden Reader, Lithium, Moon+ Reader, PocketBook, Supreader, and UB Reader. You judge for yourself which of those give the best presentation.

This first is a title page I use for all my e-books, with the title, author, a short description, and a thumbnail of the cover. Below the separator, I can add any copyright information, dedications, and epigraphs.

Click image for larger version

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If there's any interest in this thread, and if the mods don't come in and torch this post because I did something wrong, I'll come back and post some screenshots of other pages. But at the bottom (I think), there's a link for my stylebook. Give it a shot on your favorite e-reader, and I'd be interested in seeing what it looks like there.
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File Type: epub Justin's Stylebook - Justin Thought.epub (1,009.9 KB, 140 views)
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Old 06-26-2016, 02:18 AM   #2
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Nice project, fun write-up!

But I have to admit, I don't see such huge differences in the rendering.

Two readers ignore your choice of font; that might be because of your spelling of "sansserif", which I have only seen spelled with a hyphen in stylesheets so far.

FB Reader ignores your hr-break, but last time I checked (it has been a while, admittedly) FB Reader ignored nearly all formatting anyway.

It's a weird choice, by the way, to define font-size in pt. Try em and perhaps you will get a more consistent look.

And if you ever publish an e-book: Please please please don't define text-align at the paragraph level; that makes it impossible to override without changing the stylesheet, and people with taste ( ) can't be expected to read a longer prose text left-aligned

EDIT: Oh, and best wishes to your uncle.
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Old 06-26-2016, 02:42 AM   #3
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Quote:
Originally Posted by JustinThought View Post
Hello, everyone, I'd like to talk seriously about e-readers, and what they're doing to our reading habits.
Please forgive me if I missed it, but I didn't see in your long post any mention of how these various formatting styles/ereader app behavior have affected your reading habits (except to prompt your initiation of this "project" and associated discussion).

Last edited by Froide; 06-26-2016 at 02:45 AM.
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Old 06-26-2016, 10:40 AM   #4
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I agree that all code should be validated or you are testing the tolerance of Bad code sans-serif is the W3c valid

Images background: were they transparent to begin with?
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Old 06-26-2016, 10:55 AM   #5
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I like having choices. Since this "standard" you talk about would seem force someone else's ideas on me, without any tangible benefit, I don't see it as a good thing.

To me, having to mess around with things to get them the way I want them is a good price to pay to be able to have things be the way I want. It also lets me ignore many things, like moon+ [I'm a mantano/bookari guy]. Which simplifies my life :-)
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Old 06-26-2016, 01:42 PM   #6
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I don't really care what ebooks look like on devices/apps I'm not reading them with. I fix them up if they just need a tweak here or there (only if it really bothers me when reading), but I don't typically run into "horrible" formatting that I can't "just read" very often. When I do, I don't try to fix it, I chuck it and look elsewhere (or do without).

We already have "standards" for formats that are ignored by sellers/publishers, so why would display standards across different proprietary devices/apps have any better chance of succeeding? And if such a standard were to succeed, why would I want an ebook's appearance to be limited to the capabilities of the lowest common-denominator devices/apps?

By the way ... Moon+ allows me to view ebooks every which way under the sun except, it seems, for the one way I want to view it. I call it The Great Homogenizer. Wonderful for those who want every single book they read to look exactly the same (layout-wise), but I prefer a little variety.

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Old 06-26-2016, 02:02 PM   #7
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to both of you for your feedback!

Quote:
Originally Posted by doubleshuffle View Post
Nice project, fun write-up!

Two readers ignore your choice of font; that might be because of your spelling of "sansserif", which I have only seen spelled with a hyphen in stylesheets so far.
Quote:
Originally Posted by theducks View Post
I agree that all code should be validated or you are testing the tolerance of Bad code sans-serif is the W3c valid
Once you brought that to my attention, I recalled that the most common usage is "sans-serif", so I decided to find out just where I got this hare-brained usage. Much of that stylesheet is actually remnant from a conversion I made from within Open Office with the writer2epub plugin. So I tested another document, formatted in Ariel, and what came back was

body
{
font-family: "100 %", serif, sansserif;
}

Not common, I know, and from your comments, not acceptable; but it still passed verification through FlightCrew and the Epubcheck 0.3.7 plugins lurking within my Sigil. So I took the additional step just now of sending it out to validator.idpf.org and epubconversion.com who just didn't seem to find anything wrong with that terminology; each came back with a clean bill. Which doesn't make it right, I know.

Quote:
Originally Posted by doubleshuffle View Post
And if you ever publish an e-book: Please please please don't define text-align at the paragraph level; ... /snip!/
You have my solemn promise!
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Old 06-26-2016, 09:11 PM   #8
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I know that most of the e-readers on Android do not display formatting correctly. They're somewhat to severely broken. Moon is pretty bad last I looked. For example, if you only use text-indent and margin/padding (as opposed to physical marker) to indicate scene breaks, moon will mess you up. It's got a lot of features so it's very popular.

Fbreader and the ones derived from it are also pretty borked. I think Mantano and the Adobe RSDK based readers are better about properly displaying formatting. Fortunately when I do read on android it is mostly to use tts so I don't care so much.

PS: A pretty good test is Three Men in a Boat which you can find on MR
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Old 06-26-2016, 09:53 PM   #9
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Quote:
Originally Posted by JustinThought View Post
body
{
font-family: "100 %", serif, sansserif;
}

Not common, I know, and from your comments, not acceptable; but it still passed verification through FlightCrew and the Epubcheck 0.3.7 plugins lurking within my Sigil. So I took the additional step just now of sending it out to validator.idpf.org and epubconversion.com who just didn't seem to find anything wrong with that terminology; each came back with a clean bill. Which doesn't make it right, I know.
sansserif is a valid font family name (just as xxxyyyzzz is) so it will pass the validator. But it is not a valid way to refer to the sans-serif generic font family.
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Old 06-26-2016, 11:41 PM   #10
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Quote:
Originally Posted by GeoffR View Post
sansserif is a valid font family name (just as xxxyyyzzz is) so it will pass the validator. But it is not a valid way to refer to the sans-serif generic font family.
Which emphasizes that the automated e-pub generators, whether Calibre, writer2epub, or (possibly most especially!) one of the online services must be double-checked by a human eye in addition to a validator.

The style sheet in the stylebook is evolving as I attempt more things. That particular item has been corrected.
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Old 06-27-2016, 05:35 AM   #11
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If you are planning to use this css for books to re-distribute, most folks will also tell you not to set a font color, or at least to be very judicious with your colors. If you set it to black, and the user wants to read white text on a black background, s/he will be out of luck for those specific words. Better to use color: inherit for things like links (if you want to kill the blue). You will probably get away with different tones of gray, but black and white are treacherous.

Of course, if this is only for your own use, you only have to please your own eyes.

A nice concept for experimentation! I will do some checking when I get home.

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Old 06-27-2016, 10:03 AM   #12
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Quote:
Originally Posted by JustinThought View Post
to both of you for your feedback!





Once you brought that to my attention, I recalled that the most common usage is "sans-serif", so I decided to find out just where I got this hare-brained usage. Much of that stylesheet is actually remnant from a conversion I made from within Open Office with the writer2epub plugin. So I tested another document, formatted in Ariel, and what came back was

body
{
font-family: "100 %", serif, sansserif;
}

Not common, I know, and from your comments, not acceptable; but it still passed verification through FlightCrew and the Epubcheck 0.3.7 plugins lurking within my Sigil. So I took the additional step just now of sending it out to validator.idpf.org and epubconversion.com who just didn't seem to find anything wrong with that terminology; each came back with a clean bill. Which doesn't make it right, I know.



You have my solemn promise!
IIRC Flight-crew never validated a Stylesheet, only the XHTML. And then, only checked inline styles for parsing errors.
Right -click on the CSS filename (in Sigil): Validate with W3C
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Old 06-27-2016, 10:39 AM   #13
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I don't accept the basic premise that it's a good thing for all books to look the same. Printed books don't, so why should ebooks? Let publishers and authors express a bit of individuality.
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Old 06-27-2016, 01:15 PM   #14
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Quote:
Originally Posted by GrannyGrump View Post
If you are planning to use this css for books to re-distribute, most folks will also tell you not to set a font color, or at least to be very judicious with your colors. If you set it to black, and the user wants to read white text on a black background, s/he will be out of luck for those specific words. Better to use color: inherit for things like links (if you want to kill the blue). You will probably get away with different tones of gray, but black and white are treacherous.

Of course, if this is only for your own use, you only have to please your own eyes.

A nice concept for experimentation! I will do some checking when I get home.
I agree. I have set font colors within this book because I'm still experimenting with the "cascading" aspect of CSS. I generally set an extremely ugly color just to see where it shows up. I've had some surprising results. Well, surprising to me.

Quote:
Originally Posted by theducks View Post
IIRC Flight-crew never validated a Stylesheet, only the XHTML. And then, only checked inline styles for parsing errors.
Right -click on the CSS filename (in Sigil): Validate with W3C
That's a very helpful piece of information. Thank you!

Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT View Post
I don't accept the basic premise that it's a good thing for all books to look the same. Printed books don't, so why should ebooks? Let publishers and authors express a bit of individuality.
And complete vanilla or completely standardized books is not what I'm advocating. What I am advocating is that when the publishers and authors express their individuality, that that expression actually comes across to the reader the way they planned.

Thanks everyone for taking an interest here. I'm learning, and I hope I've opened a door for others to learn as well.
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Old 06-27-2016, 05:39 PM   #15
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I'm 75 and I've been reading novels since I was 4, so 71 years. I've been reading ebooks for about 25 or 30 years along with paper books and now for the last 6 or 7 years, just ebooks.

During that entire time the concept of a standard way for books to look just never occurred to me, probably because they all had their own unique look and style. Now that you have me thinking about it I'm glad that's how it is. Please, please, please don't make books all look the same.

Frankly I don't care that much. What a book looks like, the style of it's printing and formatting, has little impact on the story in most cases. Or, if it does, I'm not aware of it. There have been a few exceptions such as books by Alfred Bester where the layout of the text was almost pictoral in places. Usually though, a book has it's own font and spacing and margins and that's just fine with me.

Barry
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