Quote:
Originally Posted by frabjous
Sorry, but this makes no sense.
You can't read any format without the appropriate software installed. What do you mean by "special"? Do you mean that your operating system comes with the software you need pre-bundled? Surely, what comes prebundled is just a matter of demand. Once books catch on in general, chances are your OS will come with a epub reader. And actually, since your OS comes with a webbrowser and an unzip program, the very simplest of script or plugin is all that needs to be added. You can find scripts or plugins on this website easily enough. (At least barring DRM.)
There aren't some formats that are easier to put DRM on than others. The DRM scheme to PDFs/ePubs are completely unrelated to the part that actually contains the contents of the book. The fact that Adobe's ADEPT DRM is only applied to ePubs and PDFs just reflects that these are the formats they've chosen to use; it could easily be migrated to any other format.
ePub is definitely a better format than most of the competitors out there -- .mobi/kindle format is very inflexible and limited by comparison (as anyone who has ever tried to do anything complex in the format knows), and ePub make use of html and xhtml that a lot of people use for other purposes anyway, so it makes sense to make it a standard.
As of now, PDF is still my preferred format, since it's the only way to get proper typography in ebooks, like kerning and ligatures and end-of-line hyphenation, or to properly typeset mathematics or other formal symbolisms in a robust way. But in principle, I think once ePub supports MathML, SVG images, and gets typographically richer rendering software, it'll eventually match or surpass PDF in my estimation. |
Some people have *strange* tastes.
I'm more interested in making sure the story is readable and enjoyable-when the typography becomes more important than the story... Well, let's just say that PDF has it's place but as a standard for electronic novels is *not* 'it'.
Derek