Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
I must disagree. PDFs are excellent for the task they were designed for, which is to be a digital representation of the printed page. As such, they are a very good method indeed for preserving digitised versions of specific printed books (ie “page scan” PDFs. In my field of academia, Egyptology, PDFs provide an excellent digitising format for books which are long out of print. Many of the books I refer to frequently are widely disseminated in PDF format and would otherwise be available only in major university libraries.
PDFs “work” very well indeed on large-screen tablets such as an iPad. Long live PDF!
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I've run across a few highly specialized books that were originally made available as a PDF or scanned TPZ book. Interestingly, some of them are slowly being converted to regular ebooks. The most recent one is Kramer's booth on The Sumerians. I originally bought it a few years ago on the Kindle store as a tpz book. I ran across it last week in the Apple bookstore as a regular epub. It is a lot easier to read as a epub. Being a specialize text book, it's quite a bit more expensive than most books and I wasn't all that happy about buying it twice, but the improved reading experience is worth it to me.
Most of my current PDF's are either magazines, old scanned manuals or electronic version of material that use to be printed. Certainly, having it in PDF is better than only having it in dead tree or not having it at all, but I find the epub version a lot easier to read.