[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by WFT

1. Uncompressed? I gather this is because of limited storage on the reader?

1. Yes. While most of the current ebook readers have plenty memory or allow memory cards, there are still people who read on PDAs, which have less memory. And some PDFs go from 6mb to 2mb when properly compressed; 4mb is a substantial amount of wasted space.
   
   

   not tagged for reflow... I'm not sure what you mean by this. You mean the text doesn't flow without a particular command?

   The other replies covered this. Without tagging, when PDF readers try to reflow the text to fit a small screen, they often put a hard return at the end of every line in the original. However, tagging's not perfect, and PDFs can wind up wrapping several small lines of dialogue or poetry into a single paragraph when they reflow.
   
   This is fixable with Acrobat Pro and an insane amount of detail work. (I say "insane amount" as someone will blithely agree to proofread 400 pages of OCR work for fun.)
   
   

   no bookmarks/table of contents... In other words, you're looking for links in the table of contents that take you directly to the first page of each chapter?

   In the Sony Reader, bookmarks in the PDF become the Table of Contents in the Reader. I gather some/all other ebook readers have similar features. Links in the TOC page inside are also nice, but not as important. Bookmarks are nice, but not expected. But we'd love more authors to be aware of them and use them, especially for nonfiction books. Many word processing programs (Word, WordPerfect, Open Office) have ways of marking chapter headers so they'll automatically convert to bookmarks in the PDFs.
   
   

   print-resolution images... If the file is made to use on a reader device rather than a printer, why is a print-resolution image important? In my own case, the only images I have are for the cover and the author snapshot, but still it would be good to know more about this issue you raised, particularly in light of your first item: compression.

   Print resolution is not important; it's a nuisance. However, many ebooks are released with the original print-res cover, because the publisher is releasing their print-ready book to the public. (Sometimes with the original metadata... Suvudu's Settling Accounts by Harry Turtledove has the title listed as "Turt_0345464052_2p_all_r1.qxd" and the author as "Karen Benyo." That means the book was made in Quark Xpress, and the program was registered to Karen Benyo.)
   
   Occasionally, a 600dpi print-res picture is nice; it can be useful to have an uncompressed image for conversion to other formats, and of course it's great if you're going to print the file. But for on-screen reading, especially on a tiny reader like a PDA or cellphone, 150dpi is plenty, and we'd much rather use that 5mb for something else.
   
   

   letter-sized pages made with Word's default settings... This one particularly surprised me. Given the smaller screen size, I would have thought that either the page size needed to be smaller to fit the screen or else that it was irrelevant on a reader. I didn't use Word to type my story. I used OpenOffice swriter instead. Still, the question of page size seems quite important, so I'd appreciate more details.

Page size is the endless debate for PDF reading. Nicely-made PDFs that fit the page size of the reader are wonderful... but for that, you have to know what device they're reading on. The e-ink readers all start by squishing the PDF to fit the viewable screen, so letter-sized, untagged PDFs are an exercise in applied masochism.

And while 6" readers currently dominate the market, there are a growing number of 5" readers (it's my impression that PDFs made for a 6" screen will look at least okay on a 5" screen) and 8" or larger readers, and those are problematic, in that the PDF will grow when placed on the screen, which means 12pt fonts become 14 or 16 pts, which may be too big for reading comfort for a lot of people. (Besides, the point of the larger screen is that you can fit more content on it, not just expand small pages to fit.)

Remember, as I said in my first post, I don't own any kind of e-reader (other than my laptop), so I don't know the limitations of any of them at all! The more details you can provide, the better.

Originally Posted by WFT

As an author, you touch upon my own concern and an important reason why I posted to this thread. I don't own any e-readers, but I see scores of formats listed on this site's e-book wiki page. How can I possibly know which formats I need in order to make my novel compatible with every reader? Do I need all of the available formats listed on that wiki page?

The free ebook forums here will tell you which formats are most common for actual use. Or head over to Smashwords and look at the filetypes they offer.

ePub and Mobi are definitely most prevalent, with LIT as a strong third runner. PDB is also common, and that gets confusing, because several filetypes have PDB extension. Mostly, people mean eReader or PalmDOC format. Anything that reads eReader should read PalmDOC as well. (It's the Palm OS equivalent of a text file; it has no formatting.)

HTML and RTF are not exactly an "ebook formats," but they're easily convertible to the reader's format of choice.

QUOTE=WFT;564288]I forgot to ask in my earlier reply: How do I resolve this small ambiguity in your suggestion? Margins or no margins? [/QUOTE]

I'm attaching two PDFs (and offering thanks to Cory Doctorow for making so much content freely available); one how I'd format for reading for myself, and the other how I might format it with bigger margins for an unknown reader.

There's no absolute answer, and that's why so many of us are anti-PDF as an ebook format. It's hard to convert (well) to other formats, and hard to make changes to make it work better... there's no simple "just make the font bigger/smaller" option.