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That's an interesting point of view, akiburis. Would you mind elaborating on where you see those other formats as being lacking compared to PDF? I'm less sensitive to such nuances myself (I figure if I can read the words clearly without moving my lips, I'm doing pretty well ), and I'd like the perspective of someone who is more aware of them.
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Well, for example, their inability to render properly spaced and hyphenated justified text (or, for that matter, properly spaced and hyphenated unjustified text). This really does make a difference for me in the pleasure and ease of reading. I dislike reading ragged-right text generally and wildly ragged text always, and justified text without hyphenation is pretty unpleasant too---at least, I'm not inclined to settle for such things if I can have something better. I don't think this is a matter of being especially sensitive to nuances.
My perspective may differ from many people's in that I have no particular preference for ebooks per se versus paper books. But there's lots of digital text around, LCDs do not make for comfortable sustained reading, and printing the stuff out is expensive and unsatisfactory (my cheap laser printer isn't a printing press and bookbinding machine, after all); so I find a device like the Sony reader really useful for displaying digital text. Often, if it's worth it, formatted (typeset) with LaTeX and PDF output. Often the plain text is enough for my purposes or the plain text minimally formatted in Word and converted to RTF. But rather than depend on the Reader's rather weird plain text and RTF handling, I export that stuff to PDF, too, before loading it onto the Reader, to preserve the formatting. That's exactly what PDF is useful to me for, and why the device would be more or less useless to me without decent PDF support.
Now, what gets my goat about all this anti-PDF rant is that it seems to be meant to deprive me---if the ranters (excuse me) had their way---of something that I find very useful and, at present anyway, irreplaceable. And the anti-PDF arguments are all hooey. PDF is, everyone incessantly insists, a terrible format for ebooks because it was never meant for ebooks and is a terrible format for ebooks---a circular, question-begging argument if ever there was one. Or, because ebooks are a new digital technology, they must by some technological imperative be different in every way from paper books---that is really what a lot of these arguments come down to, it seems to me. But a technogical advance or change in the means of production and distribution---which is what the invention of movable type was, for example, and what digital type may be---needn't entail any essential change in the form of the article produced. In either case, however, it's assumed, not in any way demonstrated, that an ebook must be such-and-such, and it follows that no one must want or be allowed to have any other sort of ebook or ebook format or ebook device. All petty totalitarian fantasy, in my view.
