i Loathe ePub...

[Dutchbook]

Hello all,

As you might or might not be aware, I'm quite new to the joys of E-ink. However, I immediately remembered why I didn't bother before: ePub

I like to download a book, formatted by the specification by the writer or publisher, and just read it.

This is simply not possible with ePub.

Not even mentioning the DRM that makes buying an ebook from an independent store as pleasant as shoving a baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire up there, it also makes for a ridiculous adventure trying to format the damn thing.

Example:
This is an excerpt from the PDF preview of the book. Notice the soft serif font? the size of the letters, formatted perfectly with the rest to create a readable and pleasant viewing experience?
https://imgur.com/kk8J9Wl

Murdered by the Kobo App...
https://imgur.com/jOUEmAI

After half an hour of work, and Kobo's proprietary "TsukuMin" font, I got something which was reasonable out of it
https://imgur.com/FSCgAm8

But then, Calibre struck!
https://imgur.com/Ga5WrdZ

Another hour fiddling with Calibre...
https://imgur.com/wL9mv52

Just look how far that is from what the publisher intended.

But ok, it is somewhat legible, so lets use the 'Print to PDF' option.

And the end result: https://imgur.com/PoPWkcS

Really? REALLY?

In the past, Kobo offered to download a PDF of ebooks, but now I'm stuck with a book collection that requires me to format every.effing.book.myself and try to make it readable. Who in their right mind came up with such a horrible system?

Boy, I really wonder why e-reader sales collapsed!

[salamanderjuice]

Kobo offered PDF for some books. I’ve been using them since the days of when they were called Shortcovers and amassed exactly one book with a PDF option. The publisher also makes the ePub you buy. If it’s crappy and you don’t like it that’s on them. They could’ve also included the print font in the book if they wanted to(under publisher default).

If you know what font they use in the paper/pdf version then on Kobo eReaders at least you can easily add that font and use it to read and adjust the margins and line spacing to be similar. Personally I don’t really like reading PDFs because I can’t easily adjust the size and font of text. That’s the whole point of epub is to be reflowable so it can just as easily be read on a phone with a 5” screen as a 6” eReader or 12” tablet. PDF is not. Reading a PDF on a 5” phone sucks and is abysmal on a 6” eReader. Sure the text can be formated a bit better but it’s no use if you can’t read the thing.

All Calibre’s print to PDF does btw is print out the ePub to a PDF file. If you like how it rendered that PDF then you are perfectly fine with how Calibre renders ePubs. If you really hate the way the Kobo app renders something then remove the DRM from the book and read it in alternate reader with a rendering you like such as Calibre.

Also Tsukushi Mincho “TsukuMin” is not a Kobo proprietary font. It’s just a font for typesetting Japanese mainly so you never really see it included in English or European language focused programs.

[Philippe D.]

Originally Posted by Dutchbook

I like to download a book, formatted by the specification by the writer or publisher, and just read it.

This is simply not possible with ePub.

What you are looking for should be possible with PDF ebooks, but of course not with epub. And publishers are naturally shy of using PDF, because it's so dependent on display size.

I don't know the details of the epub format, but I believe better quality can be achieved with a conjunction of better quality epub, and better quality epub rendering software.

But if you're so focused on the typographic qualities, maybe ebooks just aren't for you - just like, I guess, the paper books of most publishers are not for you.

[jhowell]

Originally Posted by Philippe D.

But if you're so focused on the typographic qualities, maybe ebooks just aren't for you - just like, I guess, the paper books of most publishers are not for you.

I second this.

I found all of the examples in the first post to be acceptably readable and would be fine reading the book in any of those formats. For me typography doesn't need to be beautiful, it just needs to not get in the way of the reading experience.

[cfrizz]

I too found all examples readable, which is all that matters to me. So long as I can read the text, I don't care what font it is in.

So long as I can enlarge whatever font it is in to something I can read, that is all that is important to me.

[crich70]

PDF has limits as it isn't actually an ebook format. PDF stands for Portable Document Format and was never intended as an ebook format. Instead it was created so that people could access documents for business easily. So say an office in Los Angeles wants to send a document to its sister office in New York via the net. A PDF of that document is ideal for such uses. It's too rigid for an ereader (IMO) though. Sometimes the text is too light for easy reading or the text won't reflow to be easily read (i.e. font size) or you have to scroll side to side to read a given paragraph properly and that breaks the flow of the story (at least for me).

[Sirtel]

I strip the publisher formatting immediately after buying a book. Most publishers just don't format their books the way I like (too big margins, indents, line-spacing, to say nothing of the font. Embedded fonts are the first thing to go.)

As for typography, I could not care less.

[GlenBarrington]

I'm not a big fan of ePub either, I just like to read books without hassle. Which is why I have slowly converted to using Kindle 99% of the time. I still have my Tablet and my elderly Sony eReaders so I can read ePub is something I want is only available in ePub.

For me, the Kindle environment works better.

[JSWolf]

The thing is, if you had a Kobo Reader, you could have gone from the first photo into Calibre to the second photo in Calibre using the setting in the Kobo software (in the Reader) as it has line-height and margin settings. In most case, it's rather easy to remove the line height and margins so the reading software can handle it.

[orebmur]

Originally Posted by jhowell

For me typography doesn't need to be beautiful, it just needs to not get in the way of the reading experience.

I always thought typography was in first place about not getting in the way of the reading experience.

Any book's reading experience much benefits from well done typography, which is the main reason i am so keen on a sufficiently large e-ink reader device to be able to enjoy properly laid out PDF page reading.

Actually i do despise epub myself and usually rather create a suboptimal PDF from it with Calibre for reading than bothering with tuning epub readers.

[DiapDealer]

I loathe raisins. They're a terrible representation of the grape the vine produced. So I don't buy them. And you can't make me.

[HarryT]

And what happens when you want to switch between reading on a 6" eInk device and a 10" tablet? You're stuck with a PDF that's optimised for either one screen or the other; you can't optimise it for both.

I prefer PDFs for my Egyptology reference works which I read on my 10.5" iPad, but a reflowable format is far better for fiction, to my mind.

[arjaybe]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

I loathe raisins. They're a terrible representation of the grape the vine produced. So I don't buy them. And you can't make me.

Like. Boost. Repost. Whatever it is on this forum.

[arjaybe]

Originally Posted by Dutchbook

Hello all,

snipped - long, clever rant -

Nice rant. Glad you got that off your chest. Sorry I modified your intended formatting.

[AnotherCat]

Originally Posted by Dutchbook

...In the past, Kobo offered to download a PDF of ebooks, but now I'm stuck with a book collection that requires me to format every.effing.book.myself and try to make it readable. Who in their right mind came up with such a horrible system?...

In the time it took you to write a bellyache, studded with profanity, about your own personal dislikes you could have bought a .pdf copy of your example title from the publisher and calmly (on reflection, probably never calmly?) read some of it as well.