Quote:
Originally Posted by dwig
I strongly disagree with the first phrase in #2 and hold that everyone who feels the ebook must mimic paper books are idiots stuck in the past. Printers, like Gutenberg, started with that same mindset and were quickly proven wrong. Printed books changed away from slavishly mimicking the hand written and illuminated books that preceded them for good reasons. Typography improved massively over the years.
Keeping similar structure is fine and in most cases a good thing. It can be done adequately in plain text or at least markup text. I do agree that those formats that specify a "page" and loose reflowable text are "documents" and at best stand on the extreme edge of what could be considered an "ebook".
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Well, I'm not looking to maintain a layout that is a perfect translation from a printed book. I do want all the things that (normally) make up a paper book: Front matter, back matter, cover, blurb, page breaks in the correct places. Yes, you can do it somewhat, with plain text and/or markup, but a dedicated ebook format is much better at it.