Ebook typography

[elf]

Inspired by a discussion at the Mobileread forums; decided it really should go here. In a thread about ebook formats, typography was mentioned. (It always is, in the PDF-vs-epub filetype wars.) And while a lot of us who read onscreen are prone to saying, "who needs fancy typography? Just gimme text!" ... typography doesn't have to be "fancy" to be useful and important. It was brought up that typography was developed over hundreds of years, to be what's easiest for the human eye to read, and that ebooks, being fed to those same eyes, are going to need to use a lot of those standards. So I started thinking:

Conventions of typography & layout were designed for the limitations of paper. While a lot of them apply to ebooks, some don't.

( What typographical details ebooks do & don't need )