Quote:
Originally Posted by rlauzon
Ahhh... now we come to the real reason why you like PDF: to lock down your work and prevent readers from actually "buying" it electronically.
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Ahhh... now we come to the
real reason why you're attacking PDFs... because people
trying to make money like them! Those filthy heartless capitalists!...
Actually, when I first started selling my e-books, I also sold tagged PDFs, but
without any encryption. I'd known about tagged PDFs for years before that (which makes it about 5 years ago), and as I am able to easily read tagged PDFs on my PPC, as I have for most of the past 5 years, I saw no reason not to include PDFs in my list of available formats. (I would still make them available, in fact I still make them for every e-book, but there has always been a noticeable lack of interest in the format among e-book customers, compared to other formats, and I try to limit my available formats to the most popular.)
The fact that tagged PDFs can also be read, at any size, on larger and smaller devices, is one of its best traits. Not everyone reads on the same device, you know. (One of the reasons I'm always surprised the format doesn't do better.) And the fact that it is hard to convert to something else (or de-DRM) is not a fault of the format... that's just a personal preference that doesn't happen to be supported by Adobe. I hardly consider that a reason to snub the format.
So I'm firmly on the side of PDF. Maybe it's not the smallest file... and maybe too many people give it a bad rap by
not tagging their documents, and making 3rd party software that
doesn't support one of the best features in PDFs... but it's still a viable, healthy format perfectly suitable for e-books, maybe even better than some other formats out there now.