Quote:
Originally Posted by anamardoll
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. |
On the gripping hand, many PDF supporters have repeatedly made the claim that it is the "best" ebook format - and I see that as being just as much a mark of fanaticism as saying it's a useless one. It's only PDFs where I see the complaints that books aren't readable on a majority of devices that support the format.
It has its uses - but the majority of currently available PDFs are decidedly suboptimal when considered as ebooks.
It's great for displaying the printed page - and as a source document for printing - it's less than great for reading on a screen unless its been specifically tailored for that screen.