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Originally Posted by scotty1024
Given the choice of a Baen RTF which is re-sizable and currently has much sharper text on the Sony Reader than a PDF which is both non-re-sizable and suffers from moth eaten glyphs on the Sony, why would I want to download a PDF'd Bean free book from Feedbooks than a RTF from Baen?
Even in the future an LRF file will provide more readability features than a PDF on the Sony. I would submit that Feedbooks really needs to upgrade their technology support for the Sony to embrace the LRF format if they want to say they truly support the Sony Reader.
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There's a few reasons to prefer PDF over RTF:
- embedded fonts (multilanguage support)
- links (TOC)
- images
- real footnotes, nice chapter headings and footers
- better flowing of the text (less ugly blank spaces, hyphenation)
- margins in RTF/LRF are usually too big, looks ugly
Currently there's 2 bad points with PDF files when they're generated for the right device:
- you can't change the size of the font on the reader itself (but you can generate a book with the right font size)
- the Sony Reader doesn't hande PDF as well as the iLiad, a font like Adobe Times that is easy on the eyes on the iLiad, isn't on the PRS-500. But some fonts are OK on the Sony Reader too.
As for LRF support: right now the main focus on Feedbooks is still the beta, with many features that are being added, bugs fixed etc... You sound as if Feedbooks had been around for years without any new features. That's not the case, the website itself is still in beta with many features in development mostly for the News section, and new stuff added every week.
We won't be working on any new format during the beta, but as soon as the features are ready, and bugs fixed, we'll start studying which format would be the most interesting to add. Right now PDF is the best format we could start the beta with: it's supported by most of the big names in the e-ink bizness, there's a lot of powerful tools to generate PDF files out there (pdflatex is one of those), and even though you can't really reflow PDF files yet, it provides much more advanced formatting than any other format. In the future, I see two other XML based formats that looks promising: mostly Mobipocket, and LRF if Sony releases the PRS-500 or a similar device for a much larger market. The goal for Feedbooks is not to provide a bunch of e-text available in dozens of formats: that's what manybooks provides. But manybooks lack real formatting, and I wouldn't read any e-book without some sort of formatting myself. What Feedbooks provide for public domain books is a real formatting, and the ability to customize this formatting on the fly. Converting from one format to another without any formatting is easy, you just pass the whole text through some basic tool and you get your text in another format. More complex formatting takes some time, and we intend to provide good formatting for all the supported formats in the future (oh and we already tested audio books too with text-to-speech).