Quote:
Originally Posted by Xenophon
So PDF loses when I have a 6"-diagonal screen and your beautifully-layed-out document is optimized for a 13.9" screen! But ePub (today) doesn't even come close to the level of the best hand-optimized layouts for any particular size. And, in some abstract sense, what we really want is the best of both!
But with today's technology an ePub is usable on many screen sizes, where a PDF usually isn't.
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What we will likely end up with for the foreseeable future is not the best of both, but both. For some texts, like science textbooks and magazines, trying to separate content from design for display on a 6" screen is futile. Pulp novels and academic journals, on the other hand, are probably more readable than the original on even a small text-optimized display.
If you think about it, 'books' is a very diverse class of objects. We can say that they're all made of paper, but in reality the qualities of that paper and the means of embedding information thereupon approach infinity. What I think we're seeing is a sharper delineation between single-stream texts, which can move entirely into the digital realm once the price of admission falls, and books that serve as tools and/or objets d'art. Trying to cram the latter categories into an eInk device because it worked for detective novels and "they're all books" may be premature. We may find that the best digital translations for many texts aren't something we'd consider an 'ebook' at all.
So maybe PDF is not an ebook format, because 'ebook' is a much narrower category than 'book.'