Quote:
Originally Posted by DawnFalcon
And that PDF will screw up on an awful lot of readers, IME. If you're making PDF, and don't bother to make it properly, then it's going to put an awful lot more people off when the formatting goes badly wrong when their recently-updated reader shows one like per page, or whatever. (Let alone the devices, like my old, second-hand and now dead WinCE device which never handed non-Adobe PDF's well). I'll agree that this will lessen as a problem over time since PDF is now a fully open standard, but the effect remains for the moment since many devices and their readers were designed and produced before that.
And it says.. let's see, you're showing them as "PDF2". That's totally unclear, and you're relying on pop-up tags to explain what that actually means in the first place, given there is no "PDF2" format, and those pop-up tags won't display on many browsers (especially PDA ones!) in the first place. No wonder more people download the "untagged" one.
And your HTML is effectively unformatted... a common screwup, and I'm going to point at Baen doing the right thing here.
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You're turning my simple suggestion that one ought to provide the most commonly desired formats into a rant on my specific execution. I don't doubt that someone could improve on the way I've done it. But there are also limits to what one wants to spend time doing.
I've received no complaints from anyone about trouble reading any of my PDFs, some of which were done with Adobe's online service, some of which were done in Open Office, some of which (most of the tagged ones) were done in Framemaker. I cannot say the same about some of the files that were created for specific ebook formats. It is true that not all the PDFs will reflow on all devices. And maybe not all browsers will show the mouse-over explanatory tags on my web page--but most will, and I needed a way to explain the differences without taking up a lot of room on the page. I'm sorry if you don't like the way it's shown. Most people seem to like it.
I believe that most downloaders who choose PDF are probably going to read it on their computers, not on small devices. If they have PDAs or readers, chances are they'll go for another format.
And that's at the heart of my original suggestion to other authors: many people who might try your books are not going to be ebook geeks. They'll probably just open a PDF on their computer because that's what they know how to do. Most ebook-lovers will pick other formats. But why limit your audience to them?