Quote:
Originally Posted by bowerbird
and yet, in the last 15 years, the one format that caught on
-- stole the whole show, basically -- was frozen-page .pdf...
and according to every multi-format web-library i know,
it's _still_ the runaway leader in downloads. go figure...
|
That's a good point. I've always been of the mind that PDF got such a large following because the PDF reader software was given away, so everyone had it, and there really wasn't anything else that approached its ubiquity. But I don't believe its popularity was in any way due to it ever being considered suited for use as an e-book format -- I don't think that was ever even considered, really.
PDFs inflexibility really makes it ill suited for e-books: it's designed to preserve format, and it does that very well, to the detriment of readability in many cases.
That's one of reasons I've been cautiously optimistic about epub and Digital Editions. It's got Adobe's name recognition, but it's a flexible format rather than a fixed one, making it much more appropriate for e-books, in my opinion.
