Looking into the well-read future

E-books can be a strange, parochial beast. As any Kindle-user will know, the content of the Kindle store often varies wildly in terms of design and reading experience. Classics suffer especially from this. A lot of out-of-copyright classics have been digitized by volunteers and are available free, but devoid of any notes, substantial chapter headings and basic page formatting. Even worse, output from some of the big publishing houses proves little better. Pages are inadequately formatted, the type isn’t adjustable; and infuriating gaps exist between paragraphs, while the font often renders sentences unintelligible.

But there are some saints among the throng of sinners. Scouting around for my fill of Dickens recently on the Kindle store, I stumbled across Delphi Classics, an e-book only outfit that specializes in public domain content. A sample confirmed that the design was immaculate, the paragraph breaks cleanly formatted and a nice selection of illustrations to accompany the tales — the reading experience box ticked, then.