[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by donovan1983

With a large enough screen, like 14" or so, PDF might finally be practical on an e-ink device. Not to mention high resolution, on the order of 1536x2048 for 14". Although something much higher, around 300ppi, would be even better. So long as it uses a good PDF renderer, it should mirror the printed page exactly.

I really don't expect to see an eInk device with a 14" screen. Who would buy one, and what would they use it for?

Aside from long battery life and ease on the eyes during extended reading, the other advantage to current dedicated readers is portability. They are relatively small and light, and can be tossed into a (large) pocket, purse, briefcase or shoulder bag when traveling. Get a screen that large, and portability drops.

And for a fair number of source texts, even a 14" screen will require side scrolling to view the pages. No thanks. That's painful. If it needs that, I'm not going to try to view it on a reader.

And yes on the higher res. I have some photography volumes that are B&W photos, but use 300 line screens for halftone reproduction, and need to. The 72dpi resolution common for a lot of electronic devices would simply not be adequate to properly display the source material.

I can see a screen with eInk's ease of reading becoming popular as a display for systems you don't carry around. (Some folks may remember older "paper white" monitors offered for computer systems.) I wouldn't mind such a thing for design work, if it supported color and was large enough to display side-by side 8.5x11 pages in actual size. But whatever it was, I don't think it would be eInk - as I understand the technology, the sort of color support I'd want is unlikely, and I'd need a faster refresh rate than I think is possible with eInk as well.)

The current ebook formats are a bit limited and that's intentional. Mobipocket is especially limited since it uses a subset of what is today a rather primitive version of HTML. The Peanut Press/eReader format, although very different in markup, is similarly limited. Both formats are more than 10 years old, too, and were developed for devices where you had one font with maybe a few sizes. I was actually quite shocked when I found out that Amazon uses Mobipocket as the ebook format for the Kindle. EPUB will hopefully allow more fine-grained control over a book's layout, but it will still be constrained by being a reflowable format which means it will still not be suitable for certain content.

Yes, PML (eReader) and Mobipocket are somewhat "lowest common denominator" formats, originating on far more limited hardware. The PC version of Mobipocket is somewhat more capable than the Palm version, but there will still be things it can't really do.

I think we'll see limitations imposed by the device for the foreseeable future, and while ePub is more capable than Mobipocket, the best we are likely to see is graceful degradation, with the device rendering the stuff it [i]can[i] support and ignoring the rest, like automatic gray scale dithering of color images and font substitution making the best available match for what the document uses from what the device has installed.

To me, I very much prefer that I have control over how an ebook is displayed. I don't necessarily want nor expect an ebook to match the printed version. The books I've purchased so far from Amazon I have converted to EPUB format so I can read them in Stanza on my iPhone since I have it set up to display books exactly how I want them, not how the publisher may want them to display. It makes it easier and more enjoyable for me to read. Times New Roman text that is fully justified with no spacing between paragraphs is fine for a paper novel but unbearable for me to read for any length of time on a low-resolution display. Not to mention the Kindle for iPhone app is very primitive and quite buggy, not even being able to display its own native format correctly. Not to mention I've been a bit spoiled by ebooks since I've been purchasing them for 8 years so I've long since gotten used to having them displayed my way.

This is a good point. While Mobi on Palm OS, for example, is constrained in things like font selection, it will allow me to adjust page magings and line spacing, and choose the colors used for various elements, as well as decide whether I want right justification. (I don't always.)

Most stuff I read on my Palm device is in Plucker format, which permits greater contraol, as Plucker can use it's own custom fonts, and various choices can be specific to the document, rather than global for everything. (I have some computer volumes where standard text is in a proportional font, but code samples are in a monospaced font for readability.)

In a few years maybe this will be less of an issue and we can both have our ways with ebooks. I don't know much about the publishing industry, but I'm sure it would help a lot if the electronic version was a bit more coordinated with the print version. If a publisher would distill the LaTeX or PostScript file that is used for the print copy directly to an EPUB file, it would help the major issues you mentioned with line spacing and such and give output that is more closely matched to the printed version. I imagine that currently the original manuscript is used for the electronic version by many publishers rather than the print-formatted version, which means major formatting differences will be an inherent problem. This means Amazon will have to adopt EPUB, too.

LaTex? Postscript? Nope.

What the publishers all do is typesetting and markup in Adobe InDesign. The output from InDesign is a PDF file the printer feeds to an imagesetter to generate the plates the book will be printed from.

In a large bit of irony, Adobe was the principal force behind ePub as the recommended standard ebook format in the IDPF, but while InDesign can output ePub, it does so badly. Recent point releases of InDesign have added better ePub support, and I'm cautiously hopeful that InDesign CS5 will have ePub highly enough developed to allow my dream: ebook production as a normal part of the publisher's workflow. Typeset and markup the manuscript, Save As PDF for the printer, and Save As ePub for ebooks. ePub has all of the required data and metadata, so if you need an ebook in a format other than ePub, that can be a scripted conversion from the ePub source files.
______
Dennis