As a publisher we are not necessarily looking for 800 different font choices,” says Savikas. “But even at this early stage we are looking for a set of standard fonts that guaranteed to be in any device or software. “It was frustrating to contrast the Kindle’s limited fonts with that of the iPhone, which has very rich support for fonts, spacing and layout,” he says. A big part of the problem with the Kindle (the largest selling e-books reader) is its use of the Amazon-specific .mobi file format, rather than the open standard ePub. ePub is based on the XML and CSS standards used in millions of web pages and allows for far more control over layouts than is currently possible with the .mobi file format. As a result, if publishers want to sell Kindle books, producers like Defendini have to do a lot of manual work to create the digital file. In some cases, that means almost page-by-page customization, ensuring that drop caps appear correctly and that text flows around illustrations properly. E-books won’t stay ugly forever, says Sene Yee. The devices’ limitations are mostly because they are in their early stages. For instance, color e-book readers are not likely to be widely available until at least mid-2010. And the current black-and-white displays offer readers no choice beyond increasing or decreasing font size.