Quote:
Originally Posted by kevlors
I have posted the following on the blog at my ebook store. I would welcome comments.
The introduction of the Kindle has created a heightened interest in ebooks. While there have been a number of different ebook readers available for a number of years, the Kindle seems to have captured the attention of a great number of people who hadn't considered ebooks in the past. While I believe this attention is good for ebooks in general, I believe that for educational ebooks PDF is the best format for overall use. I have put together 10 reasons why I believe this to be true.
In brief, the reasons are: comfort, equipment, cost, fonts, pictures, layout, external links, internal links, printing, and cross platform capabilities.
Entire post on ebooks in education and PDF
Thanks,
Kevin |
Of course Kindle (the lead-in) doesn't support PDF at all. All PDF files have to be converted to something else. PDF is a paper substitute. It displays documents as if they were pages in a book and that book generally requires a full paper sized screen to see the entire page. This makes PDF unsuitable for portable devices. Even if the Kindle supported PDF the page size on the Kindle is too small to support letter size or A4 sized pages.
A paper book displayed in page mode needs a screen as large as the book itself to be shown properly in PDF. Some books need this, such as physics books and some other text books that depend on the page arrangement to get across ideas. Other books have no need for this kind of one to one relationship to paper and are much more suitable for use on a portable device. It is not educational use that is the issue but the type of course text books that are being used.
Dale