I've been down a bit of an e-reader rabbit hole lately.
There's a lot of great literature in the public domain, but I've had a hard time finding really nicely formatted e-books of said public domain works. Sites like Project Gutenberg and Wikisource offer up vast seas of plain text files, and it's undeniably a good thing that these archives exists... but too often, they don't even use typographic apostrophes and quotation marks (gasp!), much less pay any attention to book layout and design. No shade here necessarily, the goal seems to be archiving the text itself, and I respect that... but I'm looking for a refined reading experience, and downloading an ASCII-like text file, or an .epub crudely generated from that text, doesn't quite cut it for me.
Getting a little closer, I recently discovered Standard E-Books, which seemed really promising. They're well-designed, and they even go to the trouble of finding public domain art to use as book covers. And they're doing amazing deep dives into the semantics and accessibility of e-books. But they also seem to have a commitment to complete aesthetic homogeneity, and in this commitment they seem to carry the unspoken opinion that book design need not be specific to the text at hand. I think their focus on quantity and other forms of e-book quality over aesthetic variation is admirable, and I love that the project exists... but I also yearn for e-books that feel like distinct objects.
So, I've ended up trying to package up an .epub myself. I got to work formatting, styling, and making minor typographic edits to A Room of One's Own, based on a scan of an early edition of the book. It's been pretty fun!
However, much to my disappointment, the work of making a .epub quickly morphed into the work of trying to get my Kobo to render an .epub without it looking janky and half-baked. First I had to go down yet another rabbit hole of the variously shitty e-reader ecosystems. Thankfully Kobo has been a little more reasonable than Kindle, but I still had to get into the weeds on their truly terrible onboard .epub rendering and their strange decision to establish a proprietary .kepub format, which magically renders much better than .epub despite being nearly identical (so nearly identical that some heroic programmers reverse-engineered the format and made kepubify, which lets you convert your .epub to .kepub so your Kobo will actually take a shot at rendering it properly). Even with the .kepub format, it's felt like an uphill battle to get basic type features like ligatures working as expected. With only basic font features turned on, the kerning and tracking of justified text seems pretty sloppy and quick. I get that e-reader devices don't have the same processing power as a laptop or tablet, but it doesn't seem like too much to ask to have a book render nicely. Paper books have been correctly reflecting publisher intent for their entire existence.
It probably sounds really nit-picky, but I honestly think these shortcomings are a big part of why I've preferred physical books up to this point. When I open a physical book, I don't have to worry about the typeface it's set in, or the font-size, or the kerning and font features... the standard is that these are all aesthetic decisions that should be made by the publisher, and made not just haphazardly but with intention and care, to cultivate a nice reading experience that somehow meshes with the vibe of the book. Reading every book at the same font-size in the same default Kobo font, without any nice little touches like drop-caps or styled chapter titles, feels like it sucks at least some of the joy and delight out of the reading experience.
And that's in the best-case scenario, with perfectly formatted e-book files. Many of the e-books I've borrowed from my local library via Overdrive have looked downright janky, with mismatched font-sizes, poorly formatted half-title pages, and broken or missing chapter markers. And this is particularly disappointing when you consider the really shitty ways that publishers are ripping off libraries in their e-book lending arrangements.
Despite all my complaining, I do really like e-books and e-readers. I think it's great that it's possible to adjust font-size and typeface on e-readers, this bodes really well for accessibility. I also think it's a total cop-out for publishers to completely drop the ball on book design and formatting and expect every user or every e-reader to do that work for them.
Anyways... with a carefully generated .pdf file, all the .epub rendering issues on my Kobo go away. The page turn time is slightly slower on my Kobo, but still pretty quick... and of course all the twiddly knobs for font-size and line-spacing and so on no longer work, because those decisions are made when the .pdf is generated. But I think the aesthetic benefits, subtle though they might be, are enough to make it worth it for me. And maybe the lack of knobs to twiddle is a feature, not a bug. I can just focus on reading.
In an ideal world, .epub files would render really nicely, and reflect deeper aesthetic care and attention to detail from publishers. I'm pretty confident such a world is possible, not least because I've generated this .pdf of A Room of One's Own directly from an .epub, and I think it looks alright. I really want to dive into getting the .epub file to look as nice on my Kobo as the .pdf I'm building it from... but it seems like I might have to load KOReader or something to make that happen. I want to share the public domain e-books I work on, and I suspect the average person doesn't really want to mess with technical tutorials on side-loading custom software onto their e-reader, so I think .pdf might be the way to go, for now at least.