Quote:
Originally Posted by macr0t0r
Explain to me again why I need to chose one over the other?
- Jim
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You don't. But many publishers won't take the time, invest the effort (and training skills, and software money) to make more than one version of an ebook, unless they can click a button and make it happen.
Hence the plethora of no-bookmarks, bad-metadata PDFs, even for ebooks that have other formats available.
The ePub crowd doesn't mind the idea of PDFs being available; they're worried that if publishers focus on PDF as "the" ebook format, they won't release other versions--especially if the publishers have to pay for each format's DRM licensing. The PDF crowd is worried about the same thing: if ePub dominates, they'll lose access to nicely-formatted pages in favor of reflow formats, and publishers may not bother to make/release a commercial PDF version.
On a forum like Mobileread, most books are offered in several formats, often with slightly different features to take advantage of the format's strengths. But many commercial ebooks from DRM-using sites are only offered in one, sometimes in two formats, and the choice of which formats is never based on what best displays the content of the books.
Certainly, the buyers are never told the pros and cons of the different formats--and that's a lot of the purpose of the PDF vs ePub debate: to make sure that as many people as possible are aware that the different formats work best for different content, so that people can decide which one(s) work best for them.