Quote:
Originally Posted by Pabz
It appears that the formats are important, why in this day and age don't the manufacturers "standardise"! Makes one think that they just love making life difficult for old non-tech codgers like myself.
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Ebooks are fairly new. While some form of them has been around for as long as the web (I have a Project Gutenberg CD from 1995), the technology of digital files has been rapidly changing, and we're just beginning to get the software to where everything we want to display can be done, and we can start focusing on choices about how to display that.
There are still conversion issues--for example, although both digital & print files can do tables of contents, they're formatted differently. Tables are different. Print often uses columns; none of the digital formats are good at columns. (Nor are they necessary, for the most part.)
Currently, the best reflowable formats are ePub and Mobi, with ePub having an edge in being open source. For page-based formats, PDF is hands-down the best--but it still has all the problems that page-based digital files have.
It'll be a while before the industry settles on a single filetype, and it may not be any of the ones we currently use.