Do you like how ePub books look on your Sony Reader?

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by zelda_pinwheel

i voted for epub, but my reasons include a lot of technical details which are irrelevant for the purposes of this poll, and also (far more importantly !) the fact that i frequently do a bit of "touch-up" work on my books to make sure they are formatted in a way that i find pleasant to read ; this includes using nice fonts with proper italics versions, defining decent margins, indented paragraphs, etc. i use Sigil to edit the epub file directly ; it's not difficult at all, but it does require a bit of knowledge of css and html code, and it should certainly never be *necessary* to do that to a book you've paid for.

But given the comments in this thread, it does seem that no matter how an eBook is formatted,m you cannot please everyone. Some people like huge margins, sime like little margins, soime like no margins (for example). Some like paragraph spaces, some don't. So ePub is best since we can strip the DRM and edit the CSS to have it as we want. I strip the DRM, add in Fontin as my font choice (unless the ePub already has embedded fonts), remove the margins, fix the font sizes, and remove any paragraph spaces. It really doesn't take long to do and then I have a book I can enjoy reading.

[Madam Broshkina]

Originally Posted by zelda_pinwheel

i voted for epub, but my reasons include a lot of technical details which are irrelevant for the purposes of this poll, and also (far more importantly !) the fact that i frequently do a bit of "touch-up" work on my books to make sure they are formatted in a way that i find pleasant to read ; this includes using nice fonts with proper italics versions, defining decent margins, indented paragraphs, etc. i use Sigil to edit the epub file directly ; it's not difficult at all, but it does require a bit of knowledge of css and html code, and it should certainly never be *necessary* to do that to a book you've paid for.

but, that said, i am not sure that there can really be one answer for anyone to this poll, except for those for whom fully-justified text is absolutely indispensable (i happen to prefer left-aligned to machine justification, but i do know i'm in the minority). i say this because apart from the lack of justification support on sony devices and the display of the page numbers in the margins, there is no such thing as one universal "epub formatting" ; the formatting will vary from editor to editor and even from book to book ; one of the great things about epub is precisely that using css style rules you can do quite advanced and varied formatting. however, the sad truth is, apparently most editors have not bothered to learn how to do the formatting properly, and therefore are delivering books which look, frankly, pretty horrible (like vr's example). however, that is not a flaw in the format, it is simply shoddy work on the part of the publisher, and i think anyone who gets a book which sub-par formatting should write to the publisher and let them know you are unhappy with your purchase, and why. it's not that hard to do it right ; there is absolutely no excuse for publishers to be charging people for books that (in some cases) look positively abominable.


exactly.


you can also use sigil for this sort of thing, and given the diversity of personal preferences i suspect that a lot of people will continue to modify the formatting of their books even after publishers *do* learn how to make decend epub files. however, it still is frankly inexcusable to find commercial ebooks which are so poorly formatted as to require intervention by the customer to make them look halfway decent, regardless of your personal taste. that said, now that sony has switched over to epub, hopefully there will be sufficient outcry on the part of their customers about the poor formatting to force the publishers to make more of an effort, and about the outdated and imperfect rendering engine used on sony devices, which might motivate sony to put a little work into that. i suspect that if they just added justification support, and the option to mask the marginal page numbers, a lot of people would be a lot happier ; both of those should be trivial to implement.


those are good examples of bad formatting, alas, although i know that is no comfort to someone who has bought a book which doesn't look good. however they are not inevitable ; it is really easy to define a different font (you can even add a font to your device and add a few rules in the css to use that font for your book), and the margins. also a font which does not change size is probably some kind of formatting mistake. i am not saying that you should have to clean up after the publisher ; i am saying, the publisher should make the effort to learn how to do things right ! as for the lack of justification, it *could* easily be fixed with a firmware update, we'll see if sony ever gets around to that...


madam b, do you mean that the nook displays running headers with the title ? could you show a photo of that ? it does sound like the epub renderer used on the nook is definitely better than the one used by sony.

Attached is what a picture of the header looks like. This is not a Sony book, but it looks the same. Also I think some people are forgetting what I posted initially. I just want to know what looks better to you now. I think that is great that we can liberate these files and make them fit our own preferences but I would expect that we are in a small minority compared to the average Sony Reader user. Based on this I believe having only two answers is correct.

[zelda_pinwheel]

Originally Posted by Madam Broshkina

Attached is what a picture of the header looks like. This is not a Sony book, but it looks the same. Also I think some people are forgetting what I posted initially. I just want to know what looks better to you now. I think that is great that we can liberate these files and make them fit our own preferences but I would expect that we are in a small minority compared to the average Sony Reader user. Based on this I believe having only two answers is correct.

nice !! i really like running headers, it's great that they've implemented them on the nook. thanks for that photo.

i might have been unclear, madam b ; i do understand what you mean, which is why i said that a lot of the reasons for my preference are irrelevant to your poll. i just think it's difficult to make a generalisation here, since there isn't a universal epub formatting style, it will vary from book to book. unless you specifically only mean the justification / margin numbers, which are consistent on all epubs viewed on sony devices.

[JSWolf]

I'm don't need a running header. It just eats up precious screen real estate that we don't need to waste. Now if B&N had removed the wasted line at the bottom, then the header would not be so bad.

[Faenad]

Originally Posted by mombeck09

I must be doing something wrong. I tried first to just change so it was full-justified and leave it ePUB. When that didn't work, I tried to change the output to LFR, hoping that would accomplish the same. But I still can't get it to complete the conversion. HELP!! (By the way, my laptop is only about a month old!)

perhaps there is a problem with this ePub file. Have you tried with another ePub book? You can find one on this site, in the ebook section.

[mombeck09]

Originally Posted by mombeck09

Well, I tried the same ePUB file again, it stops at 47%. I deleted all, re-downloaded the ePUB file from Sony, removed the DRM again, and started over in Calibre. Same results. I left it running all night, still shows 47%. When I stopped it (had to use Task Manager - the Stop Job button didn't work), it cautions that it's running a process (but had made no progress in ten hours). When the eReader is connected, it sees the device and the log shows that it detects the four other books I already have on it. I made sure I have the latest version of Calibre. Then I removed that book, started all over with a different downloaded ePUB, same thing.

After I killed it, the log showed it parsed all 29 chapters and detected all 29, then nothing. Task Manager showed calibre-parallel.exe running. I closed out of everything - rebooted, and started all over with everything - same results. No virus scanning or defrag is happening in the background. I removed the eReader, and nothing but my bluetooth mouse is attached. I know the file has DRM removed, because I can read it in Calibre Ebook Viewer.

I must be doing something wrong. I tried first to just change so it was full-justified and leave it ePUB. When that didn't work, I tried to change the output to LFR, hoping that would accomplish the same. But I still can't get it to complete the conversion. HELP!! (By the way, my laptop is only about a month old!)

Ok, here's the latest - SUCCESS! I started from scratch again, and downloaded the newest (as of 12/11) version. Must be the new version of Calibre changed something because I didn't do anything else differently - or maybe there was a problem with my installation. The only way I realized it was newer than the one I got the day before was that the hourglass was changed to a rotating starburst. Anyway, ePUB files are converting to LRF in about two minutes now.

For what it's worth, the first 6 seconds or so are "converting input to HTML", the next 90 seconds shows "working" at 47% - that's where mine was hanging before - never getting past that. The next section switches to 67% and shows "creating LRF output" - I never got that far before. So whatever it's doing at 47% is where my problem was. Doesn't matter - I'm happy now. Will be even happier if/when Sony fixes this issue so books look like books without having to tweak them myself. Thanks to Kovid Goyal for a great workaround!

[Faenad]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

So the good thing about ePub is that we can remove the DRM and edit the CSS to fix what it is we don't like. And if you don't like the smaller margins, just go into the CSS and fix it how you like it.

Yet there is no way for the moment to have justified ebook with the Sony Reader. The extra page number is ridiculous too.

These shortcoming were acceptable 16 months ago when Sony rolled the ePub upgrade for the 505. Upgrading existing devices is always a great move, and Sony was one of the first to support ePub. A few initial problems were understandable.

But now that Sony uses ePub as their only format, no way. It don't matter how well formatted the Epub file is if the reader don't follow. What are they thinking?

[Timoleon]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I'm don't need a running header. It just eats up precious screen real estate that we don't need to waste. Now if B&N had removed the wasted line at the bottom, then the header would not be so bad.

The running header on an lrf file is tiny --- a nibble at best! Still plenty of acreage left, and I get to remember what the hell I'm reading.

[Latinandgreek]

Originally Posted by jswinden

Take The Iliad for example. For some stange reason many of the modern translations use the names of the Roman pantheon gods rather than the Greek pantheon gods. Homer was a bronze-age GREEK writer who lived way before Rome was a backwater village! I was able to rename the ePUB file from name-of-book.epub to name-of-book.zip, then extract the file to a folder. I then opened all the relevant HTML files in Dreamweaver and did a global search and replace on the dozen+ names of gods. Then I rezipped the folder into name-of-book.zip and changed its name back to name-of-book.epub. Now I have a more accurate translation. I am currently in the process of doing this to Genesis wherein I'm substituting the several names of god(s) from their generic meaningless English translations to their transliterated Hebrew forms. It makes for a much more accurate translations.

I HATE translations of Greek works that use Roman god names (and here I thought it was just me that felt that way)! It's one of my top 5 pet peeves.

Back to the subject at hand: I'm not crazy about the look of epub on my reader, either. Also, I find page turns to be slower with epub. I wonder if Sony is planning on updating the firmware regarding epub anytime soon.

[jabberwock_11]

I switched to ePub not because I like it (I don't), but because it is easy to strip the DRM off of and convert to other formats. I fear not being able to read my library simply because a company abandons a previously used format (Sony, I'm talking to you here) or because I choose to change my device. I have read about ePub for a while now and I could never figure out why anyone would want to use that particular format as the industry standard. I suppose any standard is better than none.

That being said, I prefer lrf format. I think it looks better and the fact that when you turn from page 20 to 21 you actually go from page 20 to 21 rather than to page 20-21 and then to page 21. I have this weird idea that ebooks supposedly set up for the Sony Reader should actually work properly on the Sony Reader without having to mess with them, but maybe that's just me.

[emonti8384]

It's funny, I ended up having someone I met on the forums show me how to strip the DRM off epub books specifically so I could have the format I want on my reader. I'm much happier now and it only takes a couple minutes.

[Donnageddon]

Now that I can actually remove the DRM and convert it to LRF, I am very glad Sony switched to ePub.

But no, at least as it is now rendered, I don't like ePub on Sony Readers.

I hope they fix how ePub is rendered soon, because I want to get a 900. The advertisements for the 900 showfully justified text, so perhaps this is coming soon.

[Lilly]

I love the fact that I was able to liberate my LRX books but I hate how ePub looks. This is one of my ePud purchased books. I removed the DRM and did nothing else. The text was to small in the small size and it left a huge left & right margin on the medium size font. Since I stopped buying LRX from Sony, I usually only buy AWZ, Mobi, or Lit. If this is the standard, I hope Amazon never moves to it because it sucks. I went to Calibre and convert the book to LRF in order to read it.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Faenad

Yet there is no way for the moment to have justified ebook with the Sony Reader. The extra page number is ridiculous too.

These shortcoming were acceptable 16 months ago when Sony rolled the ePub upgrade for the 505. Upgrading existing devices is always a great move, and Sony was one of the first to support ePub. A few initial problems were understandable.

But now that Sony uses ePub as their only format, no way. It don't matter how well formatted the Epub file is if the reader don't follow. What are they thinking?

The page number on the right side of thw page is part of ADE. It's not a Sony thing.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Timoleon

The running header on an lrf file is tiny --- a nibble at best! Still plenty of acreage left, and I get to remember what the hell I'm reading.

Still (to me), the header for LRF doesn't look very nice.