I love reading and I'm picky about how I do it. My favorite thing right now is using the Stanza reader on an old iPod Touch that has been dropped about 50 times and repaired with duct tape (which actually makes it very easy to hold). Anything that I can read on Stanza is okay by me, because I can control every aspect of how I read:
+ the way the pages turn
+ the color of the page
+ the type size, which can be changed with a two-finger swipe
+ the screen brightness, which I can change without having to leave the page I'm reading. It's just a simple finger swipe. Screen brightness control would be THE killer feature for me on Stanza except for this one
+ whether the text is flush right (force-justified) or rag right. I prefer rag right.
Force-justified text is one of those things like bad kerning that you don't see until you see it, and then you can't not see it. I really dislike ebook readers that force text to be flush right (the text runs hard up against both margins) because it leads to pages full of u n e v e n e m p t y s p a c e. The "type color" is uneven and ugly, and the page just isn't a pleasure to look at. Why shouldn't a page be pleasant to look at?
So, any book I can read in Stanza, I prefer it over anything else. This means pretty much all books written before 1923 and any book published by Melville House, which sells brilliant new books like How to Wreck a Nice Beach as non-DRM files.
For new books, I use Kindle's not-so-fabulous reader for iOS. I don't hate this reader, but it's clearly been pretty well ignored by the Amazon designers, who wish you'd buy a Kindle Fire. The controls are horsey and very limited. I have a choice of 5 set type sizes that I have to leave my page to change; three page colors including a headachey white-on-black; and screen brightness that requires you to leave your page to modify through a menu. Fine. But I have not yet found a way to change the page so it doesn't force-justify. It's not a pleasant experience to read in this reader; it is a disincentive to buy books this way, and if I have a choice, I prefer not to buy formatted-for-Kindle titles. (This leaves aside the fact that you don't actually buy those titles; Amazon rents them to you in a pretty disingenuous way.)
But the ebooks that break my heart are those marketed through Adobe Digital Editions. I wish I was reading some of the amazing titles from the University of Chicago Press. They offer a free ebook each month that is incredibly enticing. And a lot of the time I go ahead and download the book, and then remember, every month, that the book has Adobe DRM on it, which means I need to read the book in an Adobe product or Bluefire Reader. Neither of these offer the flexibility and features of Stanza, and both of them are actually rather tricky to set up. The screencap above is what I got when I tried to look at a sample chapter of a neat-looking book; my system does not meet minimum system requirements evidently. I am running this software on a two-year-old MacBook Air. And I know that if I do manage to get this book working, it's locked into this one software license on this one machine. When my old Air died, I lost access to all the sample books I'd downloaded (including one I was in the middle of: No Dig, No Fly, No Go) because the license died with the MacBook.
Ebooks right now are marketed to be easy to buy, and to use on custom machines; I'd love to see more thought given to the experience of actually reading.
In a related story, check out this post on Forbes: "Why Are eBooks Riddled With Typos?"
