For the most part, unless I am proofreading a scan of a print book and think maybe other people will be reading it, I don't give a fig about appearance or formatting, as long as the ebook reads reasonably well. I used to take DRM-free commercial ebooks, open them in Word, convert them to plaintext, and then do a search and replace for any punctuation that the cheap TTS on my accessible ebook reader might mangle. For example, I changed all the em hyphens to double dashes, because TTS will just read some junk string when it comes to most of the fancy symbols.

Alexx has this massive macro which runs a bunch of commands so that any ebooks and/or scanned texts he reads fulfill his high standards.

I think I was just forged in the crucible of having to scan all my textbooks while I was at UMass Boston, and I just didn't have time to make them perfect. Between that and the way accessible ebook readers mangle the text, I just learned to hear a more perfect version in my head.

Speaking of old ebook readers: my first accessible ebook reader, the Book Port, produced by APH?, was so wonderful. All it did was read ebooks, but the OS was so stable, and it ran off AA batteries, sixty hours on two batteries. I was one of the first people to have one, and write documentation and FAQs for it, and I have mourned it every day since it died years ago, though I still keep the corpse in state in a box somewhere.

Anyway, Alexx has been searching for one for years--they show up on eBay sometimes--and yesterday he found one, and bought it for me! It was being sold by a charity so the money even goes to a charity for deaf people. It should take about a week to get here.

This has been the ebook of my quest for the perfect ebook reader, so never feel that your ebook expectations are too high.

Oh, but have you thought of formatting your ebooks in Word? Would that be able to tweak itthe way you want? Could you write a macro to do the formatting?