Quote:
Originally Posted by tovare
Typesetting is relevant, which is why most printed books aren't a simple printout from Word or plaintext ... even if it's just fiction or poetry.
PDF is not required for the majority of technical titles, in fact ePub is superior to pdf because:
1. Superior reflow and resizing, which is usefull for smaller screens. (PDF's require large screens and is still inconvenient).
The only reason you don't see a lot of awesome technical eBooks is the lowest common denominator approach, which is largely due to Amazon's incapable mobi and the fax-machine emulation format called Topaz.
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PDF is the only format that can match exactly what is on the printed page. For many high end biology, medical, and other technical books that is the only thing that will do. Lack of reflowability is a problem for smaller devices, but as long as the screen size is equal to or greater than the physical print page size, its absence is no big deal -- the reading experience will be the same as for the printed page.
That said, PDFs do not offer a pleasant reading experience on smaller devices, but reading textbooks on these is probably never going to be a big market. A device such as the Kindle Dx is sized almost exactly right for most textbook/technical book printed page sizes (ISO A5), and the PDF reading experience is good. Non-textual tables, figures, diagrams, photographs, etc are not helped by reflowability, and smaller screen sizes present many unpleasant problems with zooming and panning for these kinds of things.
It is for these kinds of reasons (and also because their internal print publishing workflow format is PDF) that many technical and textbook publishers choose to sell their eBook versions in PDF. I have never had a problem finding eBook versions for many of the technical books that I require. Granted, you won't find many in the Amazon or Barnes and Noble eBook stores, but if you go to the publisher's web site directly, they almost always have a PDF version for sale and download -- and why not? They already have it in this format as part of their internal print prepress processes -- so why not post a copy for sale; it costs them close to nothing to do so; it's low hanging fruit.
I have found very few books in the .tpz format in the Amazon store. I have never heard it described as a "fax emulation" format. My understanding is that it uses stronger encryption and DRM than .azw/prc, but internally it's still using CSS and HTML. You also seem to be implying that Amazon has something to do with eBook format selection -- other than providing the universe of possible format selections, the choice is actually made by the publisher, and increasingly it's the publisher that does the eBook conversion as well.
ePub may have many superior advantages, but they just don't seem particularly relevant to me given the current state of the various eBook marketplaces. Of course this may change, but I think the transition to eBooks is being driven by many factors, and right now the whole ePub discussion is a bit of a side issue.