i Loathe ePub...

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

I think we actually agree. The things I require in an ebook are:

- A good TOC
- No spelling errors or strung-together words (missing spaces)
- Chapter headings (if any)
- Scene markers (white line, ***, a glyph, whatever)

Well, we're close, but...
- Don't really care about the TOC one way or another. Can't remember the last time I utilized one. I read books from beginning to end, and have no need to bounce around. I'm not studying.
- I don't have an unrealistic zero-tolerance policy on misspellings or missing spaces. No novel-length print book I ever read was without errors, so I see no need to place the bar higher for ebooks. As long as they're fairly rare, I'll survive.
- I'm Ok with whitespace-only for a scenebreak.

As far as the OP's complaints ... they lost me at "notice the soft serif font?" I don't even know what that implies (and no, I'm not asking for a lesson).

[Blossom]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

Well, we're close, but...
- Don't really care about the TOC one way or another. Can't remember the last time I utilized one. I read books from beginning to end, and have no need to bounce around. I'm not studying.

TOC or sections are necessary on some readers to estimate time left to read or how pages are left in a chapter.

Sent from my XT1528

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by Blossom

TOC or sections are necessary on some readers to estimate time left to read or how pages are left in a chapter.

Sent from my XT1528

Another thing I have zero use for.
But I understand others have different needs. I just want to read books--in a font size that doesn't make me squint.

[Cinisajoy]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

Well, we're close, but...
- Don't really care about the TOC one way or another. Can't remember the last time I utilized one. I read books from beginning to end, and have no need to bounce around. I'm not studying.
- I don't have an unrealistic zero-tolerance policy on misspellings or missing spaces. No novel-length print book I ever read was without errors, so I see no need to place the bar higher for ebooks. As long as they're fairly rare, I'll survive.
- I'm Ok with whitespace-only for a scenebreak.

As far as the OP's complaints ... they lost me at "notice the soft serif font?" I don't even know what that implies (and no, I'm not asking for a lesson).

Agreeing with this post.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by Cinisajoy

Agreeing with this post.

Me too. A TOC is nice to have, but not really necessary to me.

Now one thing I absolutely cannot stand while reading fiction is spaces between ordinary paragraphs. Any kind of spaces, no matter how small. Those have to go. They just waste the screen space.

As to font, don't care as long as it's not embedded and I can change it.

[Blossom]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

Another thing I have zero use for.
But I understand others have different needs. I just want to read books--in a font size that doesn't make me squint.

That's why I have a Kobo. I gave up on Mantano ever adding font sizes. I switched to a different app. I find most apps have font sizes too big or too small.

Sent from my XT1528

[GlenBarrington]

What I want is a hassle free experience. I don't want to reformat books, I don't even want to strip DRM from a book, I just want to READ the book. ePub has always seemed more 'fiddly' than the Kindle experience. Back in the days when Mobipocket was an independent company, and I read on my Palm 100, things were MUCH worse than epub, but Kindle is just plain easier than ePub.

I gravitated to the Kindle environment over time and will likely remain with it until it fails me or I die. Then I will look around and see what's available.

[Dr. Drib]

Originally Posted by GlenBarrington

What I want is a hassle free experience. I don't want to reformat books, I don't even want to strip DRM from a book, I just want to READ the book. ePub has always seemed more 'fiddly' than the Kindle experience. Back in the days when Mobipocket was an independent company, and I read on my Palm 100, things were MUCH worse than epub, but Kindle is just plain easier than ePub.

I gravitated to the Kindle environment over time and will likely remain with it until it fails me or I die. Then I will look around and see what's available.

You mean that when you die, you'll still look around for an ebook reader?

[Sweetpea]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

Some publishers, especially in the 2008-2012 years seemed to think that a Word-to-EPUB conversion is OK, whatever the result is, and that's just not good enough.

It's been a very long time since I've seen that (and original epub of the OP wasn't bad, just simple).

Originally Posted by Katsunami

I think we actually agree. The things I require in an ebook are:

- A good TOC
- No spelling errors or strung-together words (missing spaces)
- Chapter headings (if any)
- Scene markers (white line, ***, a glyph, whatever)

A TOC, I might look at it once.
No spelling errors (or at least not rampant, you will find spelling errors in all written publications, no matter the format) I will 100% agree on.
Chapter headings, what do you mean by that? I've had the same paper books by different publishers (whoops, already bought that book...) that had different ways of showing chapter headings...
Scene markers, I can live with a white line.


What I can't stand is a white line between every single paragrah.

Even if the paragraphs are clearly related to each other.

Because it makes reading it very annoying!


I must say, I rather like epub, as it is so versatile and easy to modify. I really like a certain line-height and a certain font to read comfortable. With epub, I can very easily build that in all of my books (using Calibre). Yes, it might take me some time to figure it out once, but after that, it's simply copy/paste and 99% of the time it will work.

[Dutchbook]

Originally Posted by Cinisajoy

Hello, if it was me and I couldn't stand the way someone did something, I would do my best never to support them. I would not buy anything from them. You gave them money for what you consider a bad product. This means they can make more product and maybe they will cut more corners. By all means, please keep supporting them because they need your money worse than you do.
If you don't like something, don't buy it. If you don't give them money, maybe they will change their ways. Long as they are getting your money, they don't care what you think.

Oh absolutely, I couldn't agree with you more.

The main problem with this is that there are NO alternatives to ePub's. On the contrary, all other alternatives have been pushed out of the market. We now have an oligopoly of 5 sellers (Amazon, B&N, Kobo, iBooks and Google). Each with their own hardware, software suite and DRM.

I would LOVE a format that allows you to buy/loan a book from a vendor and just read it, but the vendors are simply not wanting to accept it.

Here is a great summary of my opinion, written over 4 years ago. It has gotten even worse since...
http://blog.the-ebook-reader.com/201...h-epub-format/

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

Me too. A TOC is nice to have, but not really necessary to me.

Now one thing I absolutely cannot stand while reading fiction is spaces between ordinary paragraphs. Any kind of spaces, no matter how small. Those have to go. They just waste the screen space.

As to font, don't care as long as it's not embedded and I can change it.

I agree with the paragraph spaces. In most cases, they are just way too big and very distracting. As for the font, most times a font is embedded, it doesn't have enough weight for ePub. In that case, I remove it and then I can use my choice of font. I do leave other fonts embedded if they are not too much an issue.

But one thing I do dislike is when different font sizes are used. So you get normal text mostly and when you get offset text like a letter, the text is made smaller. I'd like it to be the same size.

[Katsunami]

The main part of that post is about different DRM schemes dividing the market, and making EPUB books incompatible between e-readers. I fully agree.

That, however, is not the fault of the EPUB format. If you have an EPUB file without DRM, or one of which DRM has been removed, it should work on all EPUB-capable hardware.

AFAIK as I know, the only EPUB format that differs from the default EPUB standard is Kobo's KEPUB. Kindle's KF8 is, I think, also based on EPUB, but with differences. In the end, that doesn't matter though, as long as there is a program that can convert from EPUB to whatever format my current reader uses. In the past, that was a Kindle with KF8, now it's a Kobo using KEPUB, and both are sourced from standard EPUB's in my library; and both display without problems.

[Pablo]

Originally Posted by Dutchbook

Here is a great summary of my opinion, written over 4 years ago. It has gotten even worse since...
http://blog.the-ebook-reader.com/201...h-epub-format/

The author of that post confuses ePub with DRM. DRM is not part of the ePub format or specification. The terms "Adobe ePub", "B&N ePub", etc., make no sense at all, when you read "Adobe ePub", it really means "ePub book with Adobe DRM", but I think you already know that.

You can make a horribly looking ePub book. The same is true for pdf, mobi or whatever format you can think of. That has nothing to do with the format itself, but rather with the skills of the book creator. On the other hand, you cannot modify a pdf, but you can modify an ePub to suit your tastes, provided you know how to remove DRM and have basic html and css skills.

I prefer ePub over other formats, here's why:

- It is based on html and css, which are powerful and easy to learn.
- An ePub file is an editable format, you don't need to keep a source file and generate and output file, as in the case of pdf or other book formats.
- Most readers can display ePub files.
- Epub is easily converted to other formats.
- Sigil and calibre editor are excellent tools to create or modify ePub files.

[skb]

I love epub. As someone who has been using an ereader since forever ("forever" being in IT terms...which I think puts my first Palm Pilot on or before 2000) it's nice (for me) to have a format that I can read on multiple devices.

Also, as someone who had to convert everything to plain (very) text format to read on the device, epub is luxury (in a Three Yorkshiremen kind of way)!

There is no "best" format, I suspect. What works for me, will be unreadable for someone else.

[GlenBarrington]

Originally Posted by Dr. Drib

You mean that when you die, you'll still look around for an ebook reader?

That's the plan. We'll see how well it goes.