Mad,Hopeless and Possible+thoughts on E-books -Horses for Courses.

Last Thursday I attended the launch of a delightfully illustrated chapbook, Mad, Hopeless & Possible by Siobhan Logan.
Part prose, part poetry it tells the stories of the two parties making up Shackleton's 1914-1917 ill-fated Antarctic expedition. The multi-talented author drew the beautiful line-drawing illustrations from original photographs taken by crew members. Many of the memorable poems are inspired by extracts from the mandatory diaries of crew members. The elegant prose pieces are based on rigid research.
The chapbook was published by Mark Goodwin's small press Original Plus which was also responsible for publishing Siobhan's first chapbook Firebridge to Skyshore: A Northern Lights Journey
I have bought copies of both chap books. The first one had a professionally created cover, the upside of which is that it can be kept on a book shelf, the downside is that it costs £8 which, however, is cheap when one considers the cost of similarly produced books from other presses.
Mad, Hopeless and Possible costs only £3 so is within the price range of impoverished students and strapped for cash families visiting museums who wishing to bring away a worthwhile memento.
However, when reading Mad, Hopeless and Possible in its slighter smaller than A5 current paper form I can't help feeling that the visual impact for me would have been far greater if I were reading it in epub form on the 9'' glass screen of a tablet.
When I asked Mark Goodwin who gave us the talk if he had plans for publishing the work digitally he replied that poetry, is not suitable for digital as the e-reader has the option to choose any size and type of font they like which ruins the poet's carefully constructed layout.
I realised then that he was equating e-reading with kindle format which does of course give the reader that option and is very useful for people like me who want to read without having to bother with hunting for my invariably missing spectacles.
However, e-books can be published in another format than Kindle's.
e-pub is a far superior format when visual impact is important. It may not be so useful on a small six inch kindle screen or an even smaller i-pod but it comes into its own on tablets.
With e-pub the format can be controlled by the author. When e-pub is used on a tablet
the glass screen often give illustrations and photos a magic they lack on plain paper, I thought this would have been particularly true for Siobhan's original beautifully crafted drawings.
I have bought some classical illustrated books with considerable visual impact produced in e-pub format and sold by apple store.
I have heard that it is more difficult to get one's book authorised for sale in Apple Store. With Kindle, although it has a host of excellent books in its catalogue, anyone can put up anything, however badly written.
I wonder if poetry publishers and Apple store could get together to make special terms for poetry publishers, and whether Apple store and other ebooksellers, who sell books published in e-pub form, can advise small presses of the advantages of e-pub in cases where visual impact is at a premium.