e-book fonts

[Rik]

I'm about to embark on re-publishing my poetry book in eBook format, and I'm wondering about the best fonts to use for eBook publications. The general rule seems to be that for hardcopy publishing a serif font is easier on the reading eye than a sans-serif font, while the opposite holds true for online publishing (at least in the world of websites). But what works best for e-paper as used by Kindle and other e-readers? What preference do folks in these parts have - if any?

Also, I've seen several blogposts by Our Nathan where he talks about the joys of reading e-books using an app on his iPhone - so what fonts work best on iPhone screens?

I'm not even sure I should be worrying about this - I'm assuming that e-readers can display a variety of fonts, but is this true? If yes, can users change the display font on e-readers regardless of what the author/publisher might want?

[casnow]

You can use different fonts... depends on what formats the eReaders can handle. ePub and native PDF supporting readers can handle almost any font.

No idea about what is easiest to read.

[JFBookman]

Rik,

I know that on the B&N Nook eReader, users can choose from a few fonts for every ebook depending on their taste. So you might format you book in one font, only to have it changed by the user.

With PDF you will get exactly what was in the original document the PDF was made from. But because of this, the PDF is not a very flexible format. It sacrifices the ability to reformat on the fly for accuracy to the original.

Book designers have strong feelings about fonts but I've usually found most designers prefer a pretty small subset of fonts for book work, and these fonts just keep appearing over and over again for many many years. Books are so common and so ubiquitous that we have unconscious "standards" and will reject books that are too difficult to read.

Typically, "old style" fonts are the easiest for long reading. These were originally based on calligraphic models of the Renaissance, and it's interesting that we are still using them today.