Quote:
Originally Posted by murraypaul
Most people have no idea what format the books are in, and couldn't care less.
It is a book. It has words, in sentences, in paragraphs. The fact that it doesn't support nice things like dropped caps and flowing around images don't seem to really matter, does it?[/b]
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A vast number of books can't be epublished in their original form for the simple reason ePub and mobi don't support their layout and design. It isn't a matter of personal taste determining this, it is in many cases the writing itself. In seventeenth century metaphysical poetry, for example, stanzas are sometimes written in the shape of what they describe. That can't be done reliably in mobi or epub. Most stanza forms through the centuries, from the alliterative verse of Beowolf to Pound's Canzone and the concrete poetry of the twentieth century, can't be presented in the way the authors intended.
It might not matter to you, but it did to Keats.
Prior to ebooks, drop caps, block quotes, multiple indents in stanzas and the like were quite important to writers and readers. No nebulous citation of the consensus averages we call populism, no inductive conclusion as to what people consider important in their everyday reading, can erase a thousand years of cultural practice.
Audiophiles place great importance on hearing a track as it's meant to be heard, without exaggeration by e.q. or dynamics squashing by limiter. A book might seem more abstract than that, but the mere fact many of us prefer eInk to LCD shows we would like the experience of reading to be as true to books as possible and, in many cases over the centuries, layout and design are part of that truth.
A universal format would go a long way toward addressing that, particularly if it were being improved and updated until it
could replicate the format of layout-specific books.
As a reader and writer, I would always choose the format that reproduces printed text most faithfully without adding additional problems.
PDF is the most faithful, but it is also the least flexible and therefore hardware-limitations-specific. Therefore the current choice is between ePub and mobi.