Quote:
Originally Posted by kovidgoyal
@ath: You seem to be coming from the perspective that the job of an ebook is to be a pbook. If that's you're perspective, then you're going to love PDF. If however, like me, you believe the job of the ebook is to make the pbook obsolete, then PDF is simply not the answer.
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I believe that an ebook must fulfil a number of requirements, many, possibly even most of which are the same as those we place on pbooks. No device today fulfils even an acceptable subset of these requirements. Non-reflowable PDF at least guarantees that the visual quality the book producer set for the ebook will be what the reader gets. No other rendering method that I know of can make any similar statement as to visual quality. For that reason, I view PDF as the best of all bad e-book rendering methods we have today, and for that reason I regard PDF as a legitimate e-book format.
Once there is a solution that makes PDF obsolete for this purpose, while at the same time provides the quality levels that any book (e or p) should reach, I happily wave goodby to PDF: it has then been legitimately superseded. But as there is still a very long way to go to that point (I guesstimate at least 6-8 years), I will continue to regard PDF as a legitimate e-book format - if only for the time being.
Note: I'm not concerned what with could or might be done tomorrow, only with what actually is doable today. And I am not at all concerned with reading A4 pages on an A6 device -- that's like handing a book buyer a box of unfolded printed sheets, and expect him to 'read' them.