Quote:
Originally Posted by Lemurion
As for PDFs, despite some members' love for them, the simple truth is that they don't work for the majority of people using dedicated devices. Apologists can talk about their perfect formatting all they want - but if I can't read it, I don't want it.
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I agree with this: if you can't read it on your device, you don't want the format.
That's the main reason I don't buy books in, say, mobi -- I don't use the mobi format, and I can't be arsed to convert.
I think the PDF boil in the thread is coming from a few... let us say "hard-liners" who insist that the PDF format is "not a book format". And certain people -- myself included -- disagree with that assessment.
PDF is only not a book format if perfect text reflow is a prerequisite of book formats, and I think it is not. You cannot, after all, reflow a physical book, but that doesn't make it less of a book.
I like text reflow in novels where it is appropriate. I like having as much control over my reading as I can -- including margins, font, font size, and so forth. And I think that's the ideal that publishers should aim for.
However, the current options out there are still not perfect for the reflow and resizing of images, graphs, math formulas, and the like. There are other formats and other ways to tweak and get around these issues, but (A) not every reader supports THOSE formats either, and (B) these issues are not going away any time soon.
PDF does serve to provide an imperfect solution to those problems. For people who have a lot of PDF books, like myself, there are PDF readers like the Sony 950 that work beautifully. I couldn't be happier with mine.
To just baldly say "PDF != eBook" is silly and fanatical. To say "I don't like PDFs and won't use them and don't want them foisted on me via Overdrive shenanigans" is perfectly reasonable, imho.