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[QUOTE=kovidgoyal;902324]
No I'm saying that I see no reason why a technical manual cannot be produced in EPUB. And I'm not a EPUB zealot, I am however a reflowable format zealot. I think that any document that claims to disseminate information in the form of language should not restrict the the ability of the user to consume/manipulate that information as flexibly as possible.
I'd say that, at the moment, its very much a matter of 'horses for courses'. Most ebooks are just big enough and fast enough to read ebooks on. And because we have different reading issues, its good for them to be re-flowable, asa page will contain different amounts of text.
PDFs are good on a monitor, because they are a fixed size and the monitor is just beg enough to handle them without your eyeballs falling out after five minutes' viewing. Although I guess you might one day read a technical manual on your iphone, who would want to?
Also the actual 'oomph' of an ereader is pretty puny, so it takes forever to switch from page to page. I guess the ideal for me would be a sony 1 zillion model, full colour, very fast response -- ah, I suppose this is perhaps the iPad or similar (although rather expensive to use as just an ereader I guess!)
I do find though, on a sony anyway, using the landscape view allows the reading of PDFs with less bother, although its srill all a bit clunky. It appears that size does indeed matter.
I suspect a lot of such issues will be less important as ereaders get bigger and more powerful. I hope so -- an iPad or similar colour reader would be terrific for art and science books, not to mention cookbooks!
But this is the non-fiction area of things, and, unlike novels, which start at A and end at Z, non-fiction would need to he hypertexted/indexed up to the eyeballs, as one jumps to and fro a lot with non-fiction -- a different ballgame entirely I guess. Ereaders aren't computers -- or at least not yet!
regards from edella
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