[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by LDBoblo

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.

I don't buy DRM'd ebooks. That cuts out the "pay extra for novelty" part... non-DRM'd ebooks tend to be cheaper than paperbacks, pretty much everywhere that sells them.

This limits my ebook reading range; I don't get to read current bestsellers. However, it's not like there's any shortage of good free reading material online.

And I have occasionally bought paper books in order to cut the bindings, scan & convert them to ebook formats so I can read them. I expect to do more of this in the future.

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.

Publishers are fighting hard to promote "one purchase = one person reading," which has never been the case for print books; their focus on this concept scrambles all the rest of their thinking about ebooks, including what formats to offer.

Part of what got print books' typography established, was the open exchange and sharing of those books--people loaned them to friends, who said things like "damn, how can you read this tiny type?" If only one reader got the book, if it was comfortable for that reader, he'd buy another book from that company. If he didn't like the layout or font, he wouldn't--but he also wouldn't be likely to write a letter to the publisher; he'd assume that since they printed lots of them, *someone* must like that layout.

Shared books are part of how we got standards for layouts and typography. By not allowing ebooks to be exchanged among buyers, publishers have cut off a lot of their potential feedback about what works & what doesn't.

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...

Nor does it give any hope that publishers in the future will use the format to its fullest potential.

Putting proper metadata in PDFs is a matter of 30 seconds, if it's done the slow way, with Acrobat Pro & individual files. Applied in batch to a hundred or more, it's only a few extra seconds. And yet many publishers don't bother to do this with their PDFs, especially their free promos. (Why they expect people to buy their books when the freebies are badly-formatted, I have no idea.)

It's not that I've got anything against PDFs, but that I don't expect publishers to bother offering good ones. I don't expect them to use ePub to its fullest ability, either, and I'd be frightened if they tried--I've been to some of their websites, and I don't want their HTML attempts in my ebooks.
However, mediocre ePub is a hell of a lot better than mediocre PDF, for almost everyone who reads ebooks.