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Originally Posted by Katsunami
For this once, I'm agreeing with JSWolf.
If plain text is an e-book format, you can count every document containing text to be an e-book. Plain Text, doc, docx, pdf, rtf... everything.
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I don't think that follows. Every document isn't an ebook. Just the ones that contain text that is intended to be read as if it was a book is an ebook. Web pages contain text and aren't ebooks. I have a text list of the videos on my tablets that isn't an ebook. I could easily make it into one (which, now that I think of it, might not be a bad idea) but as it stands it's a list of videos.
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In my view, an e-book format is a format specifically designed to be able to:
1. Allow reflowable text
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Some PDF's allow reflowing. Plain text files are reflowable. And why is this a defining quality of an ebook? It's a desirable quality but I don't think it's a necessity.
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2. Mimic a real book, including markup, images, front cover, and metadata such as author, title, blurb...
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Why? Granted those are often qualities of ebooks but I don't think any of them are defining qualities.
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3. Be read on devices with varying screen sizes, mainly due to feature 1, and/or by repositioning images.
PDF: Very often missing feature 1, and thus feature 3.
Plain Text: Missing feature 2 entirely.
RTF: Missing parts of feature 2 (no images, can have comments in the text, but not all implementations support metadata AFAIK)
doc/docx: Like PDF, often misses feature 1 and/or 3.
It's true you can use files such as TXT, PDF, or RTF as e-books (and I think RTF would actually be the best here), but they were never designed with that goal in mind, and thus to me, they're not e-book formats. Using those files as e-books is the same as using Excel as a database: possible, but not as it was intended.
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Well, let's see if I can do what you did! What makes a car a car? It should have wheels. Therefore a stripped down car is not a car. It should be red. Any self respecting car is red. It should carry at least 6 people, therefore sports cars are not cars.
Hey that's pretty easy. Thanks for teaching me how.
Barry