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Originally Posted by ahi
What if you get a badly made eBook? By God, I bet it will look bad! And if you can't fix it? Hmmm.... maybe you'll get a damn refund, like you do when a movie you purchase is unwatchable due to some technical error.
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So you're saying that when I load the PDF up on my 5" screen rather than the 7" one and it's "broken" I'll get a refund? Hm...let me think...no, the publishers would have to be nuts to do that. But that's the choice, PDF for every possible combination of font size, screen size, desired margin width and so or, or use a reflow format which allows user preference to control that.
It's a control issue. Stop pretending you know what's best for my reading preferences. With print books, you needed to guess them. With ebooks you don't, stop trying and give me options. I don't care if it's missing some fancy formatting if I can have the margin and font settings which make it far, far easier for me to read.
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1) There will be standard screen sizes.
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You mean like there are standard screen sizes for laptops and mobiles? Oh wait, sure they're "standard", but there are dozens of them. Given the variety of reasons people want e-readers, the same will happen for them. Each requiring, in your method, a considerable amount of typesetting time. This is expensive.
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"It seems inelegant, until LaTeX and/or PDF supports elegantly storing multiple layouts (without storing the content twice or more times over)."
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Until? Please link any movement whatsoever in PDF towards this (and not the 2002 effort for PDF, either). LaTeX has some fairly broken support for this which is incompatible with most DVI drivers.
How many professional podcast makers do you chase for not using the same formats as TV broadcasters, incidentally?
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storage space will cease to be an issue soon enough
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Again, you dismiss the issues of today with a handwave and say "oh but it dosn't matter". It does. The shape of ebooks today dictates how they'll evolve. Trying to dismiss arguments based on storage size, power and rendering time relegate your arguments to speculation. Heck, you're dismissing the requirement to typeset and proofread a dozen plus versions of a book as trivial.
And...er...you don't know what wi-fi is? Oh my.
Xenophon - What Ahi wants allready exists. They're called print books. Sorry, but I have a problem with their limits being pushed onto ebooks. (What we call print books will become one end of a spectrum of text, the no-interactive one, and increasingly rare in the future).
The majority of my reading is HTML, and I'll freely admit I have a script which adds the Webrights javascript bar to other ebooks. I am very wary of buying PDF because I
cannot tell ahead of time if it's DRM'ed or not - some sites downright lie about this (And I refuse to buy DRM'ed books as inherently broken, I'd rather buy the print book).