Thread: .TXT a last resort for anyone else?
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Old 01-09-2010, 02:16 AM   #14
Solitaire1
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Quote:
Originally Posted by ngrant View Post
I have no problem with TXT files, to me it's the content that matters. If at all available, a version with some formatting is nice (and Gutenberg has added some nice options) - my preferences are for RTF and HTML which allow basic formatting and are easily edited, say in Word. Love that Search-and-Replace! I remove the Acknowledgements, Table of Contents, any extra blurb like "other books by" and "reviews", extra blank lines and split long paragraphs like eGeezer, to make my reading experience better - after all, it's just for ME, not anyone else. I am usually reading on my jetBook Lite (5" screen) so these simple formats look great. For anything more complicated, say PDFs with lots of pictures, I read those on my big computer screen (21") to save my poor old eyes extra strain.

As they say -- "to each his own". I believe that these lovely gizmos and content that we buy (or obtain in the public domain) are for us to personalize FOR OUR OWN USE as we wish.
I strongly agree that one of the best things about ebooks is that they can be customized at little cost to suit the reader. Font size, typeface, line spacing, and so on can be easily adjusted to the way that you, the reader, want it.

I agree that plain text can be a viable format for ebook although it does have its limitations. Its greatest advantages are: (1) It's one of the few formats that is readable everywhere, and (2) it is a very compact format.

For me, the main disadvantage of plain text (and also RTF) is that I have no font control. I prefer to read my ebooks in a serif typeface and my reader displays plain text in a san-serif typeface (I can change my reader's default fonts, but that would require me to tinker with my reader's internals, something I'm not comfortable with). It's unfortunate that my reader doesn't offer an option to select a default display font.

Its for this reason that I format my ebooks as PDFs. It gives me a degree of control over the ebooks format not possible with plain text and RTF.
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