Quote:
Originally Posted by akiburis
I agree absolutely that PDF might best be called a format for "rendered ebooks." But from my point of view, it's the rendered book or other text that finally counts. And the inability of other, supposedly more "legitimate" formats, to render text really well and attractively, by any reasonable typographic standard, makes them unsatisfactory to me and, I imagine, to many people. I think it's rather absurd to insist that people who buy ebooks in PDF are misguided or misinformed. Probably, lots of them just find ebooks in the other popular formats shabby and cheap-looking, unpleasant to read, and not worth bothering with. And let's not forget that ebooks are really very unpopular and attract only a very small part of the reading public. Perhaps the inadequacy of the "legitimate" formats with respect to the actual "rendered ebook" is a reason for that unpopularity.
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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.
I personally tend to think that a significant portion of the folks who buy PDF "e-books" are doing so because they see PDF as the one format that they actually
recognize amongst six or eight others they've never even
heard of. I think that those folks probably assume (quite reasonably) that they can probably get the PDF to open, while the rest are more dubious propositions.
I suppose that view could be characterized as considering such folks to be misguided or misinformed, but I think it's more fair to call it seeing them as
uninformed (to not use the rather loaded term "ignorant"
). I think that anyone coming to e-books cold is pretty likely to see a bunch of formats and be stymied by them. Small wonder that.
I think that because Adobe and PDF are pretty well (if not universally) known, and widely trusted by the public, many folks just gravitate to the format simply because they know about it. A perfectly natural reaction, I think.
I think that's why PDF has made a pretty good play at becoming a de-facto e-book standard format, even as I don't consider it a good format for them.