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

[Dr. Drib]

Originally Posted by Amalthia

LRF gets my vote as well. I can't read epubs on my Sony PRS-505 because the page numbers in the margins drives me nuts, the lack of justification drives me nuts a little less. So no matter how well formatted the epub may or may not be it does not matter with the built in glaring flaws in the design.

I do read stories over 1000 pages long on my device and you lose screen real estate if you have to adjust the right margin to accomodate numbers.

Yes, those two things drive me nuts, as well.

I'll stick to lrf files until epubs start looking a lot, lot better. I read a LOT of fiction and I don't have time to torture an epub file into something that I find readable. And apparently, I'm not the only one who feels this way.

There's too much diversity in epub. If anyone can code an epub to look like what she or he (or some company) wants it to, then I'll steer away from epubs until this "Personality Matrix" that goes into the creation of an epub is downplayed into some kind of vanilla coating. If I want diversity in personality, then I'll read the comments on this Forum; but if I want an epub that "works" and maintains a look that approximates the written page - which is a pretty good gauge of standardization; and most readers here seem to agree with that - then give me some kind of standardization that steers away from the "Cult of Personality" that currently goes into the making of these shameless pieces of ill-looking, narcissistic pieces of garbage.



Don

[mrwar]

Definitely LRF! I am very disappointed in The Lord of the Rings epub I have just purchased...
I thought epub would be a step forward, not back...

[gabcarac]

Thanks for creating this post. I felt horrible, after reading (and buying) lots of books from the Sony store, formatted as BBeB, the switch to ePub is a step backward in terms of what I want to use the reader for. I want to replace paper books. A poorly formatted (or poorly rendered, I don't really care) is a bad replacement.

Sony, please, either update the rendering (the nook seems to be doing a better job at it) or do some quality control on stuff YOU sell on YOUR bookstore.

[Enraptured]

The Sony epubs I've tried out on my reader don't look nearly as nice as the LRFs. But I have plenty of epubs I've gotten from other sources, and I tend to like them better than LRFs. It does depend a lot on the formatting of the individual epub file, I've found. For example, I recently bought an epub from Fictionwise that had huge margins; it drove me nuts. Not enough to stop me from reading the book, but enough to make me wonder what the people who formatted it were thinking.

(But since I'm going to be switching over to my Nook once it arrives - at least I will be if I'm happy with it - I'd much rather have books that look slightly worse than books I wouldn't be able to put on the Nook.)

Once I get my Nook I'll try out some of the Sony epubs on it and see if they look better on the Nook than they do on the Sony.

Personally, I'd love to see more formatting options in the reader itself. Being able to change the font size is standard, and the Nook has different fonts available (so does the Kindle, I believe); I'd like an extension of that idea, where the reader lets you set a default font size, font, justification, margin size, and so on.

[Teddman]

The Sony store is crap now, blunty put. They might as well be selling plain text files without any formatting.

How you can roll out a store-wide switch to a format that doesn't render properly on your readers is beyond me. Fix the ePub rendering in the firmware first! At least lrf/lrx was pleasing to the eye if it was proprietary.

Is anyone actually doing QC in the Reader division? They'll never gain ground on Amazon when you have to remove DRM and jump through hoops just to get books to look right. The average consumer is not going to bother with the software tools necessary, they want it to work right upon sale.

This is just sad.

[mrwar]

Originally Posted by Teddman

The Sony store is crap now, blunty put. They might as well be selling plain text files without any formatting.

How you can roll out a store-wide switch to a format that doesn't render properly on your readers is beyond me. Fix the ePub rendering in the firmware first! At least lrf/lrx was pleasing to the eye if it was proprietary.

Is anyone actually doing QC in the Reader division? They'll never gain ground on Amazon when you have to remove DRM and jump through hoops just to get books to look right. The average consumer is not going to bother with the software tools necessary, they want it to work right upon sale.

This is just sad.

I make your words mine! I won´t buy from the Sony store anymore until someone around here says things have improved...

[bremler]

Is it ever likely the Sony readers *could* do right justification and get rid of the page numbers? Are they working on it as we speak - anyone in the know? I'm really not sure how it can be achieved, someone mentioned it's not a Sony issue but ADE. If so, what could be a workaround? Many of us I think are suffering because we would love to use EPUB but have to compromise with its shortcomings on the sony readers.

[Latinandgreek]

I have to say, epub is growing on me. The lack of right justification doesn't bother me so much anymore.

Apparently the prs-900 has right justification on some epubs, and the numbers aren't shown on the right side of the text anymore (or so I've been led to believe), so who knows, perhaps we might see a firmware release for the 500, 505, 300 and 600...

[Wetdogeared]

Originally Posted by bremler

Is it ever likely the Sony readers *could* do right justification and get rid of the page numbers? Are they working on it as we speak - anyone in the know? I'm really not sure how it can be achieved, someone mentioned it's not a Sony issue but ADE. If so, what could be a workaround? Many of us I think are suffering because we would love to use EPUB but have to compromise with its shortcomings on the sony readers.

There has been previous mention here of making the page numbers optional.

[bremler]

Thankyou! Thankyou! Broad grin on my face. Now I'll wait with baited breath for the other big one: justification.

[mrwar]

But what about resizing the font? This is what is bothering me the most by far, the epub I bought won´t resize properly like all the other 150+ books I have in my reader...
Resizing is very important to me! And it was a feature that worked with all books from the Sony store before this epub conversion...

[vivaldirules]

Originally Posted by mrwar

But what about resizing the font? This is what is bothering me the most by far, the epub I bought won´t resize properly like all the other 150+ books I have in my reader...
Resizing is very important to me! And it was a feature that worked with all books from the Sony store before this epub conversion...

I think that's probably another case of the publisher of the particular epub you have doing a really bad job. I have epubs that do resize the fonts on my Sony 505 so it must be a functionality that at least some epubs have.

[ChristopherTD]

The software on the Sony readers should allow more things to be overridden, such as margins, fonts, and font size. In an ideal world this wouldn't be necessary but all of the ePub books I have bought look nasty on the PRS-600 because the margins and font size are inappropriate. However I can read them fine in Stanza on the iPhone because that has options to cheerfully ignore the font/margins coded into the ePub.

All of the ePub books that I have converted myself with Calibre (from PDB/LIT) look excellent on the Sony. The problem is software, so there may yet be a firmware upgrade that gives us that extra layer of control on the Reader?

[mrwar]

Originally Posted by vivaldirules

I think that's probably another case of the publisher of the particular epub you have doing a really bad job. I have epubs that do resize the fonts on my Sony 505 so it must be a functionality that at least some epubs have.

I really don't know about other epubs but the Lord of the Rings purchased on the Sony Store after the epub conversion will only resize the Chapters titles and
Table of Contents but the rest of the text does not resize.
It is bizarre and a major letdown for me because the text is too small for my taste...

[vivaldirules]

Originally Posted by mrwar

I really don't know about other epubs but the Lord of the Rings purchased on the Sony Store after the epub conversion will only resize the Chapters titles and
Table of Contents but the rest of the text does not resize.
It is bizarre and a major letdown for me because the text is too small for my taste...

Whoa! That really stinks. I'm rereading LOTR right now but, of course, it's the LRX version (which works fine) since I won't buy or read an epub unless I have no other choice.