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Originally Posted by rlauzon
One more thing about PDF that you alluded to: It's page-centric.
What does the concept of pages mean in an eBook?
In paper books, pages are used for:
1. Partitioning the book. People usually stop reading on a page/paragraph break.
2. Indexing - the index points to the page.
3. A place to put footnotes.
In an eBook, we need none of this.
1. The partitioning is now by paragraph. This is how I read eBooks on my Palm today. There are no "pages" but rather one large text with paragraph breaks.
Bookmarks can be put anywhere in the text.
2. Indexing no longer need to refer to the page - it can be some sort of link directly to the item indexed.
3. Footnotes no longer need to be put at the bottom of the page, but can be a link directly to the footnote text anywhere in the document.
So what do we need the concept of "pages" for? And why do we need a format that is based on this out-dated notion of "pages"?
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Couldn't agree more. "Pages" are bad news when it comes to ebooks, and pdf is the worst news of all. I still haven't found a reliable way of reading a pdf file with tables or graphics (there are pdf readers that handle text pretty well, though turning a page still takes time). If only there was a cheap and reliable way of converting from pdf to html so that it could be converted by iSiloX or Sunrise! But the pdf conversion programs that you see are mostly horrendously expensive.