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Originally Posted by Moejoe
Good, because I'm not arguing, I'm just trying to understand the pros and cons of both approaches. I really don't know enough to say outright which will survive (although I do have a gut feeling that ePub or some derivative of such will eventualy become the standard).
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I think ePub may become a secondary standard--but I think it will lose prestige, becoming relegated to use for user-generated and (possibly) self-ePublished stuff. Professional quality publications from publishers/companies will necessarily be PDFs.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Moejoe
Once a book is created in ePub then the base information is always available, no matter what happens. With a PDF the base information could be lost due to error, misplacement, or any number of other everyday catastrophes (I'm talking here about the pre-press files associated with the production). It's no easy job to OCR and then typeset and whatever else has to go on before this 'wonderful' ebook is produced afresh. With an ePub, the heavy OCR work is out of the way already, and with new/modified applications this ePub can now be re-opened and maybe with a template or some other as-yet-not-invented system, the typography and layout restored.
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Granted. But I don't think the average publisher's fear of losing their production files is sufficient for them to want to back them up on their customers' devices.
I myself don't even feel compelled to release the LaTeX file (a 75 KB text file basically*) for "The Art of War" for such reasons... not even while I make the eBooks available for free. And if you take a large publisher, frankly if they ever have problems doing conversion into a new format, they'll probably offshore retyping to two different Indian or Chinese companies and (beyond in-house proofreading) compare the two copies to ensure they catch all mistakes made only by one or the other... and they'll have the book re-/newly typeset for whatever format with hardly noticeable new expense (given the moneys they burn through).
What you describe might be a compelling reason for a self-publishing author to use a readily convertible format--but I don't think it would be for a publisher.
- Ahi
* Which I could attach to the PDF, if I wanted... forever placing into every PDF downloaders hands the full production source file that generated said PDF.