Which e-book is best?

Librarians may complain about the difficulty of reading text on an e-book, but most of us can't easily find the reason for the problem. That's why blogs written by specialists in typography and book design are so fascinating and valuable. Craig Mod writes a blog not aimed specifically at librarians, but extremely useful for them. A few weeks ago he discussed some of the problems of reading e-books and talked about how of them could be overcome by a more careful choice of font and attention to details. Hyphenation may not seem a serious problem to most readers, but when font size is increased for people with visibility issues, the absence of hyphens causes unacceptable blanks in lines and makes reading difficult. There's no doubt many book designers and programmers are reading this blog and learning. It's time librarians did the same. The more we know about what makes a readable book, the better we'll be able to serve our patrons, whether children or adults.