[LDBoblo]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

If I'm financially flush, book C is my first choice. I like the small size & portability of mmpbs; I've always preferred them to hardcover or trade paperbacks. When I've got less money to spare, I'll take D; it's several steps up from the dot-matrix printed books I used to sometimes read. (Does it have to be in a big font? Why wasn't it laid out in two or three columns like a newsletter? That's what I do when I'm printing ebooks.)

The parameters of the exercise are not to suggest comprehensive realistic choice, but rather allow people a shot at their instinctive default choices. The problem is that people who haven't read my opinions would automatically assume that one or more choices is somehow wrong, and so they try to bypass the constraints of the exercise in order to suggest that they've transcended any attempts I'd make to belittle them. Truth is, it's just an exercise, and to a point it helps illustrate the angles we discuss this topic from.

I appreciate good layouts in books, but I'm fairly oblivious to the finer points of typography. (And I say that as someone who's chatted with people who design fonts for a living; I appreciate the elegance and complexity involved, but the nuances are wasted on me. I have preferences, but a book's layout has to be truly hideous before I'll stop reading.) Portability is my top concern; I read fast, and nearly constantly when I can, and I want the next book at my fingertips when I finish this one. The only books I want in hardcover or durable bindings are reference books, generally RPG manuals.

Certainly many people are like this. I was looking around for The Catcher in the Rye the other day at the bookstore and picked up a very compact version that attracted my eye on size alone. Picked it up and thumbed through it, rather aghast by the terrible printing. For once, I understood what was meant when some folks claimed their ebook reader yielded better viewing quality than some paperbacks. This thing was so poorly printed on such mediocre paper that I didn't even bother looking at the price on the back. Doesn't make me any better or worse than people who snatch it up for being a compact copy regardless of textual presentation.

I won't say that my interests are best, or that the industry should revolve around them... but the industry should take them into consideration, because I won't pay extra for good typesetting; I'd rather buy text files that I have to format myself.

I don't expect the industry to settle on one format of ebook any more than we've settled on one size of computer screen, or one type of car, or one material for cooking pots. Different needs, different interests, different media.

This is a very reasonable statement. Of course, currently you're paying extra for novelty of digital when it comes to modern books. Paperback pricing and higher for intangible book-viewing licenses is ridiculous. It's almost like the publishing industry is mocking ebook readers sometimes. There are potential solutions, but it seems that ebook development is still in the dark ages, and epub is a sort of patchwork that will "more-or-less" get the job done for the limited (but rapidly growing) consumer base. Seems most people who own Kindles and other ebook reading devices have ridiculously low aesthetic standards anyway, and that doesn't really help in terms of pushing to protect the design-oriented sides of bookmaking in the digital era. PDFs are done generally without thought to that market, since the majority of ebook reading is still done on a PC.

My ebook reading preferences are:
1) PDF I've made myself: 3.46x4.6" pages, .1" margins, 9pt Fontin condensed .1 pts 3pt between paragraphs 1st line indented .3" main text, 12 pt centered chapter headers, title page formatted to my artistic whims of the moment, PDF with chapters bookmarked and tags;

2) PDF I've made myself to share with other people: font change to Georgia, proabably 10 or 11-pt main text size;

3) ePub
4) RTF 15 or 16 pt basic font size,
5) Calibre-made LRF (which goes here, but in practicality doesn't exist; I don't convert to LRF, and Sony's LRX's are all made with a larger font than I'm comfortable reading)
6) Commercial "paperback sized" PDF, cropped to remove headers/footers, possibly with bookmarks added, with tags & metadata added,
7) Txt
8) Commercial "paper back sized" PDF, locked to prevent editing. (This'd be ADE PDFs, which I don't have any of? Or PDFs I pick up somewhere that I don't have access to my unlock software.)
9) Letter-sized PDFs.

I don't know which of those PDF versions is supposed to make me give up my ePub preference. I do know that there is NO hint from publishers that they're considering making PDFs sized for e-Ink readers, of any size.

As you noticed, people who support PDF as a book format support it on principle, but not on current provider offerings. Many here agree that PDFs done nowadays are generally of a very low standard. That does not diminish the potential of the format, which to them (and me) is superior for presentation purposes when used effectively. Yes, the key word is effectively, which is not done currently. I'll buy an ePub of a book instead of a PDF under most circumstances because ebook production is so miserably poor that ePub is about the best out-of-box offering. That's not a credit to ePub, but an insult to the publishing industry.