Quote:
Originally Posted by Jim Lester
If you want an indication of what Adobe is thinking you should be asking marketing instead of engineering  Bill McCoy's blog contains interesting little nuggets such as this article:
http://blogs.adobe.com/billmccoy/200...uthor_ebo.html
My personal opinion is that if you want to do reflow it's much easier if you start with a reflowable file format instead of page oriented file format (and you'll get better results), and so I use ePub files on my Sony Reader instead of PDF files. Fortunately, the major publishers seem to be coming to this conclusion as well and they are moving to generating ePub content. |
Very interesting article indeed!!!
I am all new to both my ereader and the world of converting files to read them on it. I am on an extended holiday, and so I have had time to spend hours on the net looking for texts on the issue of e-publishing. And I've come to the conclusion that PDF is indeed the better format for text, IF (and it's a big if) the document is properly formatted for the screen.
After all, one cannot simply discard 300 years of typographic tradition. My best looking books, and by good looking, I do mean most pleasant to read, not just look at, have been home-cooked using inDesign. It takes quite a bit of time, work and knowledge to produce, but the results have been better than anything sold in any of the reflowable formats, even the native .lrf.
The move to ePub, as mentioned in your article, is mainly validated by the need to read books on a variety of formats. This is true only to a certain extend: although various devices are used, the three leading e-ink devices, the PRS-505, Kindle and Iliad Rex Book, have reasonably similar-sized screens. If you start with a PDF as your base, it would be difficult to reformat it to be read on these, but if you have the original press file (inDesign, Quark, or even Word), it's a breeze.
Some publishers used to take pride in the way they would typeset a particular volume. I still have books, paperbacks, where the last page is dedicated to telling you which fonts have been used and with what philosophy. It does seem editors don't give a damn anymore. The main problem with the Adobe Digital Editions offerings when displayed on my reader is not due to Adobe, but to publishers who will not go the length to provide the proper formats. I understand it would entail an additional cost, but I'm still dismayed.
So yes, you are right, reflowable format is, alas, the way to go. Alas, because although it means we will be able to read our books with little trouble, it also mean they will never look as good as they used to. I, for one, will endeavor to find my books in .rtf format, so I can "home cook" them myself. But then I'm on holidays, and I might not always have the time to spend 2 hours on a book just get it to look the way a book should.