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Originally Posted by cussedness
Since I am here to become enlightened, bear with me while I ask a question after reading your complaints about pdf.
What are the alternatives to pdf and what software is involved?
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Oh man – welcome to what is at least sometimes called “the e-book Tower of Babel.”
The “bad” is that there are about a half-dozen “major” e-book formats other than PDF, all of which have at least something going for them. The Mobileread Wiki has an
exhaustive list containing info on more formats than anyone ever really faces.
The “good” is that PDF is the only major fixed-layout e-book format – all the other most-widely used formats are XML/SGML-based “reflowable” formats. Reflowable formats work like HTML, sacrificing some typographic quality and layout control for flexibility. PDF is inherently optimized for one particular display – be that pieces of A4 paper, a landscape computer monitor, or a 6" portrait e-ink display – while a single reflowable format file displays equally well on a wide variety of screen and font sizes and orientations. The PDF case is made worse for readers on this forum because most e-books released as PDFs are optimized for letter/A4 paper rather than our smaller e-book reader displays.
The “better” is that most of the most popular reflowable formats are not only HTML-like, but HTML-based or -derived. The most popular “device-independent” e-book formats used by major publishers are Mobipocket, Microsoft LIT, and eReader, all three of which are HTML-based. The
International Digital Publishing Forum has established a set of standards for describing a “raw” HTML-based e-book, and various vendors/developers have produced tools (some open, some free, some neither) for converting from the IDPF’s standards to the “consumer” formats. Going one step further, the most recent versions of the IDPF’s standards include a “container specification” which allows one to directly package an IDPF-stardards-compliant book as a “.epub” format e-book. Many people here expect/hope .epub to get a lot of traction, although at this time the only vendor supporting it directly is Adobe with their Digital Editions software. The conversion from HTML to non-HTML mark-up–based formats like Sony’s BBeB format and the FB2 format (apparently popular in Russia) is less direct but still comparatively simple, and existing tools are again available.
The gold standard for dealing with the e-book Tower of Babel is how
Fictionwise.com handles their “multi-format” books. Users can download purchased multi-format books in any of a dozen different e-book formats, and can re-download the book in any format at any time. They appear to have a software pipeline which converts from one source form (probably an IDPF OEBPS book) to the collection of downloadable formats, with provision for separate custom-generated versions (i.e., some books have high-quality PDFs with full formatting, etc).
Whew. Hope this helps
.