[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by ondabeach

As far as PDF or any other format 'crowding out' the ePUB format, It's going to be the other way around. It may take a few years but the ePUB format will become the defacto standard for sharing virtually all types of electronic documentation.

No, it won't.

Because in a lot of the business and legal industries, the ability to print exact copy pages is very important, and ePub doesn't have that. PDF does. PDF will continue to dominate the legal industry (the way that tiff dominates the digital archive industry, and they are almost interchangeable at this point), because having digital "pages" is very important in a lot of legal situations.

Businesses will continue to use PDFs for other digital content because they're dealing with PDFs for legal content (contracts, copies of records). When they're not using PDFs, they'll continue to use Word (twitch) because the bulk of the typing is still done by people who are most comfortable with desktop publishing software, not web-editing software. Or they'll use Powerpoint (shudder, twitch twitch) because sales reps who are utterly baffled by Word's complex table options (I wish I were exaggerating about that) will be able to fill Powerpoint slides with info and occasionally pictures.

EPub may take over the books-for-entertainment industry, but it won't catch on in the business world; it's too malleable for legal uses, and too hard to make for standard office uses. Oh, and Windows machines don't come with create-read-edit ePub software.

The ePUB format is capable of so much more than any other format inherently due to it's structure. It can be used for novels, newspapers, magazines, story books, newsletters and the other obvious document types as well as everything else from patient records to menus to building plans, anything in fact that contains text and or images, or music files, in fact an ePUB can contain any other type of file you can name.

• Scanned images at 300dpi with searchable text included.
• Digital forms you fill out and print on the spot.
• Presentations that move from one slide to the next.
• Easy-to-edit contracts that can be printed in whole or in part for new clients.
• Files to be shared around and each reader adds their own annotations.

The structure of an ePUB, being based on html, xml and their derivitives makes it incedibly powerful and flexible.

Neither of those is really important in many business settings. They're almost drawbacks; they're codewords for "this filetype takes an hour or more of training to do anything with other than just read it."

Because these files types are familiar to virtually every programmer on the planet it means that adopting it as a standard is extremely easy and inevitible.

I work in an office of 30 people. I believe nobody in the office knows more HTML than I do. (On a good day, I can code simple tables. With background colors, even. I know no CSS at all.) Programmers are not as common in most business settings as you'd like to believe.

OTOH, everyone in the office knows how to make PDFs... you click the little button that says "convert to PDF" in whichever Microsoft Office program you have open!

Imagine being able to read the one file on any device or program, no need to convert it from this or that using this program or another. It will happen, just as it did with music files, and the only format that is capable of making that happen is the ePUB format. Can you name any other format that has any kind of hope at all in doing so?

That filetype, is PDF. Or txt. Microsoft could've turned Word Docs into that filetype, but they thought they could squeeze out the competition without allowing use of their code, and failed.

All of those formats have severe limitations, and I don't promote any of them as good ebook formats. But the best formats for ebooks are not the best for business and legal purposes, and fighting against PDF's encroachment into all digital document settings will take more than claims that ePub is more versatile. (It is. But PDF does some things that ePub doesn't, and those things are crucial to some very powerful industries.)