Quote:
Originally Posted by GhostHawk
Why Epub?
Because its relatively easy to put DRM on it? Same for PDF?
You can't open it on a pc without first loading special software for it.
Which is not true of several other formats.
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Basically because the industry recognized they had to pick
something, so they went with a format that uses HTML, which lots and lots of people know how to work with. The industry will DRM anything, so that's not going to influence the decision much. PDF can't really reflow well, so even though it produces output that is lightyears ahead of anything else in quality and readability, you're stuck with a static page, and all the work you put into making that chapter look as good as possible in TeX or InDesign for that device just got blown out of the water when you try to reformat it for another device. Very labor intensive, and no publishing house is going to produce multiple font-sized, multiple screen-sized versions in PDF of every one of their books.
I was disappointed with the choice of ePub just because it uses HTML, which was never designed to be a true typographical engine anyway, so it only produces mediocre output at best, and come on, we
are talking about reading books here, not simple web pages. It would have been much better if the industry had gone with a wrapper around a TeX-based rendering engine - that would produce output that looks ten times better than HTML right out of the gate. Oh, well - licensing to Knuth might have been an issue, who knows.