I think it's bad that it ever became one of the defacto formats for fiction ebooks, unfortunately many people buy books in this format every day. It'd be nice to see numbers, but of the popular formats (Mobi, LIT, eReader, etc) I bet it's not at the bottom of the list sales wise. So in that case the the folks buying it have in fact legitimized it & publishers have legitimized it by offering it as well. So doesn't that make it legitimate in the grand scheme of things?
For me personally it's not a legitimate format, in that I won't buy books in it.
I generate layouts all day & love PDF. It's simplified our entire workflow with our printer for all our prepress needs. I just wish they had never started offering ebooks in PDF format.
I guess for books that need to maintain a specific layout to be helpful, like some textbooks, tech journals & stuff it might even be a good format. For fiction it sucks.
