title_body: Does conversion between filetypes always break formatting in ebooks? Do different file types of ebooks have different formatting parameters? It looks like many of my ebooks layout came from the Soviet Union or from a typewriter that has no options. It would be really nice to have a more aesthetic look.
upvoted_answer: Different authors spend different amount of time getting the formatting right. Also, support for various formatting changes over time. I formatted some things in 2011 which were the best available technology at the time, but wouldn't look good on today's kindles. (I'm redoing one such book at the moment). 
  
  One of the problems is that ebook conversions are usually seen as afterthoughts after the print version comes out. 
  
  My rules of thumb: 
  
  
  PDFs to anything generally sucks
  EPUB to Kindle does not suck anymore (via Kindle Previewer (kindlegen)) -- especially if the CSS were done right.
  MS Word to epub (via Calibre) does not suck as long as headers are consistently styled and you are not using a lot of invisible formatting (i.e., hard carriage returns, manual centering etc). 
  Ebooks with images are hard to convert well. 
  MS Word to PDF generally does not suck (unless you think of PDF as inherently a sucky/inflexible format). 
  Encoding errors are a frequent problem when converting from one format to another. They are also easy to miss during proofing. 
  
  
  One other thought. Some lesser known reading systems  don't support much publisher formatting but impose their own default css on the ebook -- and give users the option to override publisher settings. You need to make sure you're viewing it in ibooks or google play books, adobe Digital Editions or possibly kindle app.