Quote:
Originally Posted by Moejoe
What I think I'm driving at is that these publishing companies, as they evolve, might lean toward the cheap data reproduction of ePub over costly re-setting of an already published PDF.
|
That would be a clear loss for the consumer, however. Format shifting to a less sophisticated format is (sometimes) simple. But you cannot, by design, so easily format shift to a more sophisticated one.
If publishers never take it on themselves to take eBooks as seriously as they do real books (and they do find the money for their backlist titles to be retypeset and reprinted on dead-tree books, so I don't see why saving a few bucks in making eBooks would make a world of a difference [particularly since unlike physical ones, eBooks have no shipping or other distribution costs]), eBooks will never be a realistic replacement for dead-tree books.
ePub, unless it starts encapsulating multiple display size and font size PDF files, will never be able to match the quality of physical books; so eBooks will either have to opt for PDF or will remain only for a nieche audience or only for typographically primitive books. In either case, for most things other than casual reading, people will find themselves stuck with paper books.
That seems to me more unlikely than the reasonable enough wholesale adoption of PDF (with, perhaps, ePub as an also supported standard to allow quick and dirty content generation for those with less sophisticated software tools or know-how).
Good discussion we are having though.
- Ahi