MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - commercial software for Kindle/mobi from scanned math texts

xristy · 12-10-2013, 06:13 AM

I suppose it's nice that some people in India get some work out of laboriously generating these ePub and mobi files.

I actually didn't realize how the "professionals" were creating these eBooks.

My concern is that the market is being flooded with garbage. It's really a shame that PDF as a format takes such a bad rap for eBooks when in fact it is actually far superior for technical materials (I realize that ePub / mobi are great for mass market fiction and lots of non-fiction which I'm sure is like 95% of the sales.) PDFs work great on an iPad with, for example, Goodreader and I expect there are excellent PDF readers on Android tablets as well. There's certainly no problem with PDF access on a PC.

I appreciate that there are limitations to some of the Kindle and other eBook readers but it is really unfortunate to destroy the typesetting of technical books for the sake of annoying the authors and the users. There are numerous situations in which Amazon pulls eBooks owing to shoddy preparation and there are plenty of negative reviews of Kindle versions.

I only use PDFs which limits availability since there is a mind set to dump mobi / ePubs that are poorly prepared and that apparently really can't use appropriate technologies such as SVG or MathML.

Creating good quality OCR'd PDFs via scanning of books for which source is not available is tractable for me with Acrobat X so I assume there are better tools available to commercial outfits.

Is there no way to promote the availability of PDFs for technical materials? Aren't PDFs routinely created as part of the workflow for physical printing? Are the sales of poorly formatted mobi / ePub technical books really sufficient to warrant the effort expended in producing them? Wouldn't it be cheaper by far to forego producing mobi / ePub versions and just offer much lower cost PDFs for sale?

12-10-2013, 06:13 AM	#8
xristy Connoisseur Posts: 54 Karma: 210 Join Date: Sep 2007 Device: iPad	interesting, more questions I suppose it's nice that some people in India get some work out of laboriously generating these ePub and mobi files. I actually didn't realize how the "professionals" were creating these eBooks. My concern is that the market is being flooded with garbage. It's really a shame that PDF as a format takes such a bad rap for eBooks when in fact it is actually far superior for technical materials (I realize that ePub / mobi are great for mass market fiction and lots of non-fiction which I'm sure is like 95% of the sales.) PDFs work great on an iPad with, for example, Goodreader and I expect there are excellent PDF readers on Android tablets as well. There's certainly no problem with PDF access on a PC. I appreciate that there are limitations to some of the Kindle and other eBook readers but it is really unfortunate to destroy the typesetting of technical books for the sake of annoying the authors and the users. There are numerous situations in which Amazon pulls eBooks owing to shoddy preparation and there are plenty of negative reviews of Kindle versions. I only use PDFs which limits availability since there is a mind set to dump mobi / ePubs that are poorly prepared and that apparently really can't use appropriate technologies such as SVG or MathML. Creating good quality OCR'd PDFs via scanning of books for which source is not available is tractable for me with Acrobat X so I assume there are better tools available to commercial outfits. Is there no way to promote the availability of PDFs for technical materials? Aren't PDFs routinely created as part of the workflow for physical printing? Are the sales of poorly formatted mobi / ePub technical books really sufficient to warrant the effort expended in producing them? Wouldn't it be cheaper by far to forego producing mobi / ePub versions and just offer much lower cost PDFs for sale?