Today I want to talk about an area of ePUB and Kindle design which is never mentioned. The reason it is not mentioned is that only iBooks and Kindle Fire have the capability. There are a few peripheral apps that can: Bluefire on the iPad & Readium on Chrome, plus there may be more on Android, but I have no way to test that.

There is a huge difference between the two options

You can clearly see the differences even on the reduced size image. Actually, the non-embed on the right is a little better in most dumb readers in that lists normally show some sort of bullet. But to get that, I need to not embed the fonts and use HTML lists which are quite bad in themselves.

The iBooks side look quite a bit better in iBooks than the screen capture suggests, and the Kindle on the right looks a little bit worse.

I don’t need this, I write novels

Even here you can see the difference, but it isn’t that bad, right?

There may be little difference with simple books like this, but with truly complex non-fiction, it gets pretty gruesome. The good news is that Adobe joined Readium today. That may well mean that decent ePUB readers are on the way.