[LDBoblo]

Originally Posted by dmikov

Are you saying when they will become universal, they will also become one size? I don't think so.

I think you are confused about the difference between books and ebooks.

Typeseting is important for books same as binding material, paper quality etc, it is of little to no importance for ebooks.

I don't want set margins, I don't want set font sizes. I care very little even about font face the publisher thinks I want to have. Same publishers that give me eye breaking no line in between text in paperbacks
I want reflow, I want my footnotes to be on the bottom of my page, not a hypothetical 8x10 inch. I want to be able to read my book on my iPhone and my 24" computer screen with the same user experience.

If I want to have typesetting I'll buy leather bound folio sized paper book. Actually, sometimes I dream of having this ideal electronic device, that will give me all typeseting you talking about, but then I realise I would have to have it on the desk in my library room near comfortable leather chair and realise I dreamt too much. We live different lives.

I'll admit some of us are unreasonably fond of the art of the book, and feel betrayed by its translation into essentially its crudest raw form possible. There is a minority that feels that this same move is a liberation of content from the jaws of an inflexible beast of antiquity. Some feel that traditional typesetting methods and presentation are something that should be trusted to experts, and others do not like extending that trust to a rigid format that is not personally tailored to them. It can be an artistic entity, or it can be pure information for direct consumption. Depending on your romantic inclinations, either could be an attractive choice.

I'm not wholly traditionalist, as I've seen too many well-meaning projects that were absolutely atrocious to read due to poor design. It can be a restricting factor to be shunned, or it can be an artistic factor to be appreciated. Naturally any rigid format with a long history is going to be polarizing in that way. I have always bought books partially on the visual medium itself, and not simply on the content. I've always been able to acquire content through libraries or borrowing from people, but I would buy the book itself for the content and presentation. If it were a badly-enough executed book, I wouldn't buy it unless I were forced to. And I'd never even dream about buying a book for someone else if it were of poor visual quality. Not everyone has those (somewhat arbitrary) standards, and it's pretty obvious on this forum.

To me it's got a bit of a semantic catch to it. A book to me is a form of presented content. A unit that is complete and somewhat rigid in itself. It includes the encapsulating presentation, which is otherwise raw information. I like the idea of buying ebooks, but I'm not particularly fond of buying estories. Semantic nonsense? Absolutely, but nevertheless one of the primary sources of my reluctance to embrace digital format books.

As far as eliminating alternative formats in favor of PDF? I don't think that's a great solution, and I don't think offering pdf-only is a great solution. However, I will continue to invest hours on basically every "quality" ebook I want to own, converting it to an appropriately-sized PDF for my Sony Reader. It's a bit futile with the low quality of the display, but it's the most satisfactory I can get, and the only way I can convince myself I like reading on my reader. Snobbish? Absolutely. PDF is not for everyone, but trying to act like an iconoclast and proclaim PDF is evil and wrong because it lacks a malleable low-quality presentation is as ridiculous as saying that RTF and Doc have no place in an office because everything should be done as PDF. Both assertions are patently ludicrous in their absolute form.