Thread: A silly question: what is the advantage of ePub for a reader?
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Old 08-12-2009, 01:51 PM   #40
ahi
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Quote:
Originally Posted by dmikov View Post
You personally of course, but there is plenty people who look at ebook for portabiltiy and ability to change font size.
That will stop being the case when eBook readers become reasonably universal and have to stop primarily being toys and pulp novel reading devices.

Quote:
Originally Posted by JSWolf View Post
PDF is not an eBook format. It's a document format for printing.
As usual, when the topic turns to PDFs, you clearly don't know what you're talking about, John.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Penforhire View Post
PDF may indeed be the most universal (I confirm that anecdotally at work) but it is a HORRIBLE format for varied e-readers. We need one of the formats that are NOT pre-rendered. I don't have a dog in the Epub fight but I'll take that or LIT or RTF way ahead of PDF.
The only (arguably) cogent argument for reflow formats is the desire to arbitrarily adjust the font size at the press of a button. Doing so necessarily comes at the cost of any hope of decent typography... which is the cornerstone of bookmaking.

PDF is the only eBook format. Everything else can only make documents of whatever quality or bad to terrible electronic Books.

The fact that reflow formats have no hope of ever decently managing anything but the most simply layed out books (for entirely objective and factual reasons that will not change with the foreseeable advance of technology) means that there is no chance of a reflow format ever becoming the only (or even primary) eBook format... once the eBook market stops being the tiny niche curiousity that it currently is, and eBooks will actually be expected to be able to accommodate books of any genre without looking like they were made in Microsoft Word.

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Of course... none of this changes the fact that today, 9 times out of 10 a mobipocket or an ePub is more worth downloading because hardly anybody knows how to create proper PDF files for eBook devices. Which is why I stated that ePub (or preferably mobipocket) make good sources for converting into PDFs... which is the only way I can enjoy an eBook reading experience that doesn't make me regret not having bought the $2 paperback instead.

- Ahi
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