Originally Posted by Jellby
I have to say something in favour of PDF. There is something PDF allows and most of other formats (if any) don't, and that is typographic quality. With the appropiate tools (like LaTeX, or InDesign), one can create PDFs of high typographic quality, and by that I mean a good selection of fonts, good kerning and spacing, ligatures, good paragraph shaping, uniform page "colour"... not to mention the possibility of complex formatting, margin notes, frames, headers, graphs, etc. Some of this is maybe not useful for just plain fiction books, and most people probably don't know/care about the typography, but I certainly prefer to read a page that looks like a printed book instead of like a notepad.exe screenshot.
Now, the problem is PDFs are usually not created with the care and knowledge needed, not even with the right page size, they are often just the output of MS Word, and almost anything is better that, I agree. Of course, "real" ebook formats have also their advantages, like reflowing and the possibility of changing some parameters (font size, margins...), but the readers don't have the same quality that's possible with PDF (they use simplistic line-breaking algorithms, for instance) and the formats don't have the same flexibility (how many formats allow absolute positioning of text on the page? text along curved lines?)
Take the PDF version of Carroll's "Sylvie and Bruno" I uploaded in these forums as an example. I don't claim it's perfect, but I think I managed to create a good looking book, with illustrations, no large whitespaces... it's not perfect, but I don't think it's crap either.
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