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Originally Posted by NatCh
It's certainly not Sony's fault that there is no standard format for electronic books -- there is no such format. If such a format existed and they were still selling their LRF books, then they ought to be scourged and hung out to dry, but that's not what they're doing. And no, I don't consider PDF to be a standard format for e-books. It's a standard format for distributing documents electronically while preserving their page layouts. For it to be any kind of e-book format, it would need to support text re-flow without a bunch of acrobatics (you should pardon the pun), so that the files could be read on screens that are not, themselves, A4 in size. Of course, if it did that, it wouldn't be preserving the page layout, so it wouldn't be what PDF is meant to be.  |
Great points about PDF... ultimately, PDFs are supposed to preserve page layout, so the PDF can never be the defacto standard... unless it changes. Adobe could create some kind of super-PDF that contained rules for how to reflow/reformat for different sizes... but I'm not holding my breath. My big collections of PDFs will NEVER work nicely on my current Sony Reader device, no matter what magical software/firmware update they develop. Never.
Until my mystical super PDFs come along, we've got TXT, RTF, or HTML. Those are still the only book formats I am interested in collecting... I have a few thousand, so far, and hope to replace 80% of my paper library soon. I guess RTFD does what we want reader devices to do, but RTFD isn't widely accepted. It is really odd to think that HTML/XML is the only existing book format that might eventually meet our needs.