Quoth wrote the following as part of a post:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Quoth
A true ebook has always been reflowable. The predecessor of epub2 was in 1998 and mobi and earlier mobipocket formats (pdb encompassed mobi and other incompatible formats! Palm database) worked on Symbian, Windows CE, Palm OS etc on any size/resolution screen, though very limited formatting. A PDF is a joke on the Palm, though Adobe did a reader.
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Concerning the .pdb format, it was created to solve a problem with Palm PDAs. Due to limitations of memory, IIRC you were limited to 4kb for a documents like notes. While that was okay for notes, it wasn't for ebooks.
In keeping with the Palm Philosophy at the time, which was to only put the basic apps on the PDA, and if you wanted more write it yourself (they made it easy to write your own apps). One thing that Palm didn't include on their PDAs was a ereader app. Someone did and created an ebook format that was saved as a .pdb file for ebooks and also came up with an ereader app. Someone also created a desktop application to create ebooks for the Palm (the format was basically a simplified version of HTML, although it also bore a similarity to the Wordstar format). The main limitation of the .pdb ebook format was that it was one typeface for the entire ebook. I used it and I found it an enjoyable read on my Handspring Visor.
Concerning PDF on the Palm, I agree that it wouldn't be very good unless the ebook was written for the screen of the Palm PDA (IIRC it was 3 inches by 3 inches, with 160 pixels by 160 pixels for the entire screen). It might have been okay for text-only ebooks but that's about it.