On Mon, Sep 24, 2012 at 1:03 PM, James Adcock <jimad@msn.com> wrote:

>How about trying your experiment with more recent books? The current crop
are up in the 40000+ range.

OK, as a "sanity check" I went back and double-checked more recent
submissions to see if they are no being formatted "reasonably correctly."
IE, if this was an e-book that I had bought commercially would I say "yes,
this formatted reasonably" or "no, this book has corrupted formatting." Not
a high standard, just: does this book "work" or not?

40000 no
40001 no
40002 no
40003 no
40004 no
40005 no
40006 no
40007 no
40008 no
40009 no

The two most common and glaring problems are:

1) Paragraphs are not formatted "reasonably" corresponding to any known
standard of formatting at any point in time of mankind.

And 2) No TOC in an e-book where one would reasonably expect and need a TOC.

What is our standard target (more specifically, what were you testing with)? I have found commercial ebooks render considerably differently in FBreader and Coolreader on Android, not to mention PG books (I almost always have to adjust the default font size on a per-book basis, at the very least). I think there are similar rendering differences between the Kindle, Nook, and Sony readers. I've fallen back to running them through a TTS engine and listening to them exclusively as MP3s again, as none of the Android ebook readers I've tried does an acceptable job of realtime TTS, so the formatting issues no longer bug me. :/

-R C
(I listen to books during my commute, but was hoping to be able to switch between reading and listening; no go. Both of the readers had consistent trouble with their TTS plugins, both with the default voice and with the Flite engine; either skipping significant sections of text, or repeating it, as well as problems of not registering as a background service, getting swapped out, and losing its place in the book. Also, the voices were reeaallyy slow compared to what I usually run my desktop TTS at.)