Quote:
Originally Posted by Elfwreck
I agree they care more about the average consumer than what ebook fanatics think is the "best format."
I suspect this means we'll see watermarked PDFs, locked against casual editing & printing, not multiple formats. That way, they can claim that "everyone gets to read the book the same way."
Mobi can't support the layouts in The Tales of Beedle the Bard. Epub can, but only on those machines that have the right kind of CSS support, which I suspect is not many of them.
From Rowling's past comments, I expect she wants as much control as possible of people's reading experiences, and that includes fonts, art layouts, and page sizes. The fact that that approach is incompatible with e-readers hasn't clicked yet for her; she has a Kindle but hasn't realized that books on a Kindle look different from the same books on a different e-reader. And probably hasn't spent any time trying to read PDFs on the Kindle.
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This is the impression I receive as well. There have been several comments from Pottermore about controlling the user experience, although not phrased in that manner, of course.
The thing with eReaders, is that the beauty is that you can have a CUSTOM experience. Don't like the publisher's font? Change it. Don't like their margin settings? Rip 'em out. Want the text sized differently and don't care if the resizing messes up the poetic verse or aesthetic layout? Go for it.
I know Pottermore has said ePubs, but I just don't see that working out in the long run to fulfill their stated goals, not the least of which because the images and page layouts are going to be tricky. (How did the pirate versions manage? Are they all PDFs? I'm curious.)
Seems to me that they're either going to have to go with PDF (which will still not meet their stated goal because different readers read PDF differently), or they'll have to lock down the epub to prevent the watermark/margins/font removal, or they'll have to give up on controlling all readers everywhere into having the exact same experience with a book as everyone else. Which is a stupid goal anyway, imho tyvm.
If they DO go with PDF, the partnership with Sony readers makes more sense (best PDF reader on the market imho), but I don't think the fans will be happy.
