I’ve tried other e-books. My preference for paper books has nothing to do with one specific provider.

A special app for reading books is needed? So I have no chance to read the book on my dedicated reading device?

And their app description is revealing: “The Windows Viewer lets you view the pages of our books in pairs, just as they were intended to be read. As a result, this is an excellent Viewer for reading our books, especially on computers with large screens. ”

NO! Sorry. Someone who writes this has no idea at all what reading or designing an ebook means. “Intended to read”??? The whole point of semantic ebook formats is to get rid of this to display the book in the best way possible for the current device. Otherwise it is just barely usable on… oh, there it is: “computers with large screens”.

Of course it is hard to get ebooks when publisher in 2015 still are able to offer such proof of professional incompetence. PDF as an ebook format is bad enough. It is so bad that it legitimately can’t be called an ebook format (it is for layout accurate documents, something completely different).

But this solution with dedicate reading software that even enforces a page arrangement is far worse.

Don’t judge ebooks in general by this worst of the worst solutions.