PDF is not an eBook format

[ahi]

Originally Posted by DawnFalcon

Professional knowledge of print book making. This is like claiming that because you know how to produce for TV, people making commercial podcasts should be hiring the same amount of staff as TV studio. They are not the same thing, although they can cover the same content.

Tagged PDF's are bulky and CPU intensive and still miss basic options avaliable for other ebook formats. On top of the allready far higher page rendering cost of the PDF format...do explain how you're going to fix that while you're about it.

No. How about you read some more of this thread's older posts... because I'm not going to yet again rehash old answers to the same old nonsense.

Also, your posts seem largely content-free... when one subtracts the gleeful ridicule.

- Ahi

[DawnFalcon]

Yes, why would you want to rehash the same nonsense you've put out before? It remains nonsense.

And there's no "glee" whatsoever in my posts, and it's factual rather than ridicule (sarcastic, perhaps, but still fact-reliant). You are, quite litterally, a relic of another age in books. Even if you were totally correct, though, your viewpoint would not be worth considering for a business because the vast majority of readers are willing to accept a reasonable degree of formating, not "perfection", and catering to "perfection" is simply too expensive for the small market who demand it.

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by ahi

The vast majority of books can be adequately typeset for probably a screen as small as 8" - 10".

They can also be typeset for 6" screens. Since they need to be re-typeset anyway, because the print editions are never going to standardized sizes the way that e-screens are (even if there are several e-ink screens, that'll be "six different sizes," not "twenty-seven+ different sizes" the way that mmpbs, trade paperbacks, and hardcovers have), why not make them fit the most common size of portable ebook reader?

6" screens aren't such a huge jump down in content-fillable space that the typography would have to be re-invented to work. (IPhone & PDA screens are; whole different hassle.) Ebooks could be designed for them, and most people would stop asking for reflowable formats if they got PDFs that fit nicely on the screen to start with.

And, like I said many times before, no automated solution can match the quality of human attention.

It can't. Which is why we're getting more and more badly-formatted commercial ebooks, even the PDFs... typesetting has become an obscure art. Those who believe nothing will convince publishers to spend more time per book, would rather have a reflowable format.

To me any suggestion to the contrary makes me wonder whether the arguer is oblivious of the existence of large print books, or, for that matter, the fact that hardcovers and paperbacks are often different sizes If it can be done for paper books... why is it so inconceivable that it will be done for eBooks in the future?

Not inconceivable. Just unlikely.

Who will give publishers the feedback they need to make these upgrades in their production processes? And which publishers are going to pay attention? Last I heard, the Lord of the Rings series still had obvious typos.

Do you really think publishers who release promotional materials with metadata that says "Title: 120307_FINAL.qxd" and "Author: mrg" are going to suddenly decide that someone in their editing department needs to learn typography-for-200dpi-screens?

And tagged PDFs already reflow well enough, I understand... so there's your solution to people reading on devices that aren't worth reading on.

Auto-generated tagged PDFs run short lines of dialogue, and lines of poetry, together as one paragraph. This can be fixed--by editing the tags in the PDF itself, not in the generating software.

I've done it. I'd do it again. My rates start at $23/hour, and it's slow work.

Reflow also loses much of the formatting, the margins & indents. It can set initial capitals on a separate line. Why should readers put up with that, when there are formats that show up fairly well on the screens they have?

[ahi]

Elfwreck... to me nothing sounds more incredulous than your implied suggestion that bookmaking will, relatively speaking, go down the crapper for good with the wide adoption of eBooks.

Nothing that you (and obviously many others) seem to find so unlikely feels as incredibly unrealistic--in fact downright surreal--to me as that.

- Ahi

[ahi]

Originally Posted by DawnFalcon

Yes, why would you want to rehash the same nonsense you've put out before? It remains nonsense.

And there's no "glee" whatsoever in my posts, and it's factual rather than ridicule (sarcastic, perhaps, but still fact-reliant). You are, quite litterally, a relic of another age in books. Even if you were totally correct, though, your viewpoint would not be worth considering for a business because the vast majority of readers are willing to accept a reasonable degree of formating, not "perfection", and catering to "perfection" is simply too expensive for the small market who demand it.

Grow up and start making sense, this isn't the lounge.

- Ahi

[Verencat]

This isn't the place to be rude either. I would ask everyone to remain respectful.

Thank you.

Cat (moderator)

[dmikov]

To mr Ahi and some others who bought into his rhetorics.
The question of the thread is not Typography vs. plain text.
Good typography is good. Why would anybody say no to a better looking book? If it came with no strings attached.
What many people on this thread are trying to say is when typography overrules the major attraction of portable/mobile universal format, that can be read on any device (from iPhone to 24" computer screen), then we don't want it with it's limitations.
And that's what a pdf is.
So please abandon the posturing of an elite connosier and all insinuations, that people don't know what they want from books. That's just ridiculous.

P.S There is no reason to invent straw man of death of bookmaking or abandoning decentrly formatted book. That's not what this thread is about and nobody but Ahi saying that. This thread is quite simple is about can an old aniquated pdf be a fit for a new media i.e e-book reading devices or not.

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by ahi

Elfwreck... to me nothing sounds more incredulous than your implied suggestion that bookmaking will, relatively speaking, go down the crapper for good with the wide adoption of eBooks.

Nothing that you (and obviously many others) seem to find so unlikely feels as incredibly unrealistic--in fact downright surreal--to me as that.

Prediction:

I think that human format editing will be lessened as much as possible, the way that proofreading has been largely turned over to word processing programs. I think it'll still exist for special editions and art books, but mainstream paperbacks will have their content thrown into a program, get a few minutes of scrollthrough with touch-up for anything that looks really awful, and then printed & output to whatever ebook formats they're going to produce.

The programs will do a better job than 90% of individuals can (which is not saying much on its own), and will have algorithms that look for rivers and orphans and can hyphenate a couple-hundred words, so editors can point the the program results vs raw documents in basic WP programs, and say "see, it's better!" And they will insist this frees them from the need to hire a person to carefully do layout for every book.

Some publishers will continue to have human-proofed, human-formatted books. They will be sneered at for being old-fashioned elitists. Some will profit; some will collapse, and this will be taken by mainstream publisher as proof that those methods are no longer cost-effective.

The general public will continue to claim to notice no important differences between a PDF made from a Word document with default settings and a carefully-formatted paperback-sized ebook PDF. They will claim to prefer the letter-sized ones, "because I can print that," even though they won't print either. They will also be baffled at the idea of text-based PDF vs image-based PDFs. To them, both have words on the screen; what's the difference?

The science of typography won't change, but its place in the commercial marketplace of books will. And the general public will continue to be unaware that typography exists, or matters to them.

[LDBoblo]

Originally Posted by dmikov

To mr Ahi and some others who bought into his rhetorics.
The question of the thread is not Typography vs. plain text.
Good typography is good. Why would anybody say no to a better looking book? If it came with no strings attached.
What many people on this thread are trying to say is when typography overrules the major attraction of portable/mobile universal format, that can be read on any device (from iPhone to 24" computer screen), then we don't want it with it's limitations.
And that's what a pdf is.
So please abandon the posturing of an elite connosier and all insinuations, that people don't know what they want from books. That's just ridiculous.

P.S There is no reason to invent straw man of death of bookmaking or abandoning decentrly formatted book. That's not what this thread is about and nobody but Ahi saying that. This thread is quite simple is about can an old aniquated pdf be a fit for a new media i.e e-book reading devices or not.

Sorry but I'm going to support Ahi's perspective more or less. I'm interested in the whole "reinvention of the book" idea with hardware and software solutions, and I agree with most that right now, PDFs are often really crappy in practice, but the current popular formats aside from PDF are half-assed even in theory. Hey, that's cool if you don't consider literature to be a visual art in addition to being the words themselves. If you want nothing more than a hardware edition of Microsoft Wordpad, more power to you. Many, many people aspire to higher standards of presentation and visual quality and readability apart from simply enlarging the font.

I'd be reasonably satisfied with the low-grade ePubs if their cost reflected their quality. I'd be much more satisfied with PDF if the publishers did their bloody jobs and made decent files in the first place. As far as I'm concerned, everything available today is pretty poor, and I guess reflects the state of the ebook reader technology (even though it's a minority of all digital book reading)

However, if designers and publishers took ebooks seriously enough, they would invest time and energy into them. That isn't happening yet.

There certainly can be places for flexible layouts, where presentation is generally unimportant. I wouldn't expect to read blogs in finely-crafted PDFs, but then again I also wouldn't pay to read blogs, unless they had some kind of real professional value. It's like paying to watch YouTube.

If I were more proactive and the cognitive scientists I know weren't too busy smoking marijuana and applying for grants for video game research and generally uninterested in books unless the pages roll well, I think it'd be fun to gather an independent think-tank to work towards a new reading paradigm that transcends the codex and the online web page; one that could be developed in conjunction with available technology. Patchwork solutions like "uh...let's just use css" are a bit unfortunate. Of course, I'm not more proactive, and the people I know who would be good to work with on something like this wouldn't want to do it without a healthy grant...

[ahi]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

I think that human format editing will be lessened as much as possible, the way that proofreading has been largely turned over to word processing programs.

That doesn't sound true... Elfwreck. Not with regards to published books. Do you have well-founded reasons to believe so?

- Ahi

[ahi]

Let me politely point out:

Originally Posted by dmikov

The question of the thread is not Typography vs. plain text.

Indeed--and I do believe this post of yours is the first time such a comparison has been brought up.

Originally Posted by dmikov

What many people on this thread are trying to say is when typography overrules the major attraction of portable/mobile universal format, that can be read on any device (from iPhone to 24" computer screen), then we don't want it with it's limitations. And that's what a pdf is.

And, plainly, they are wrong. For books--unless you have redefined books in your mind as nary more than pulp fiction--PDF is the only format that has any chance of offering both quality typesetting for specially targetted devices and reflow to smaller than optimal/untargeted devices.

HTML, the markup language that ePub basically is (and what most other reflow formats also are, albeit in a more crippled way), is 18 years old and at least for the last 6-8 years better typography has been to varying extent a perceived priority among web developers... but anything borderline proper typography via HTML still remains elusive in the foreseeable future.

Your concern about tagged PDFs being large and processing heavy are so temporal that they are truly silly to have ever raised. Both processing power and storage space (in terms of tagged PDFs) will cease to be issues at all in as little as another year or two... if indeed they genuinely are issues today, of which I am not convinced.

Originally Posted by dmikov

So please abandon the posturing of an elite connosier and all insinuations, that people don't know what they want from books. That's just ridiculous.

No. Along with your car mechanic, your dentist, your banker, and your contractor I will continue to firmly hold to the notion that I know my areas of expertise better than some random person that thinks they know more than I on account of having looked at/handled/used the final product of my field of work.

This notion is only ridiculous if you are ignorant about bookmaking and assume it's the sort of thing that can be successfully taught in a two-day weekend course. If you actually have even just a superficial understanding of the depth and breadth of issues and considerations involved in producing a quality book, chances are you will neither consider yourself just as qualified as a professional nor will you illogically assume that it is a task that is machine- or software-automatable.

Originally Posted by dmikov

P.S There is no reason to invent straw man of death of bookmaking or abandoning decentrly formatted book. That's not what this thread is about and nobody but Ahi saying that. This thread is quite simple is about can an old aniquated pdf be a fit for a new media i.e e-book reading devices or not.

This thread is about people ignorantly ragging on the only professional eBook format that exists, because the publishers they buy eBooks from are yet to give a damn about eBook reading device owners and have yet to target either reflowable or non-reflowable professional quality PDFs at them.

And what I am saying, and will continue to state--what with it being the plain truth and all--is that no reflow format, particularly not one based on HTML, can do a good job with typography. Why? Because trying to do so hands part of the typographic work off to software... and typography is not a software-solvable problem.

The easiest to understand issue is hyphenation. If software cannot reliable and accurately hyphenate basically all words contained in a document, it has every chance of encountering situations where it may be able to make no typographically sound decision.

In English, ignoring the fact that there are well over a million words, which may be combined in impossible to foresee ways to produce, for all intents and purposes, infinitely more words... not to mention the possibility of foreign words being included in the text, proper names whether common or esoteric. If the software cannot figure out the correct hyphenation pattern for all the words in a given eBook, it cannot arbitrarily reflow and expect to be able to render something still professional-looking. (I suppose only reading eBooks about working class Americans, with common Christian names, going to well-known popular places, doing things everybody knows about/has done before is a good way to minimise software hyphenation problems.)

In other languages, you can easily get into a situation where a given word can mean two (or more) entirely different things and therefore also have differing correct hyphenation based on what they actually mean in the given context... context that may be difficult to impossible to determine via software due to the language's relatively free word order. Not that the idea that eBook reading software should have to know anything about the semantics of the text isn't ludicrous to begin with... because it truly is, and there are languages where without that, getting hyphenation right is literally hopeless. Unless of course you will have a human being spend more time manually pre-soft-hyphenating the entire document than it would take to typeset it to popular eBook reading device screen sizes as tagged PDFs (so they reflow to less popular eBook reading device sizes in the less than optimal way they cannot help but do).

If you have a solution--not involving technology magically saving the day in the future by as yet unexplainable means--to the hyphenation problem... perhaps I am wrong and you are right. If you do not... I would suggest it is a strong sign that you are not sufficiently aware of the issues to counter my statements insightfully.

But I said all of this before. I am absolutely certain even in this specific damn thread.

I'm off to go slumber in my magnificent Ivory Tower now!

- Ahi

[Sonist]

Originally Posted by DawnFalcon

Yes, why would you want to rehash the same nonsense you've put out before? It remains nonsense.

... You are, quite litterally, a relic of another age in books. ...

... catering to "perfection" is simply too expensive for the small market who demand it.

Wow!

It is ironic, to see claims like this, from people who consider primitive, barely formatted text to be the bleeding edge of modernity, and who's idea of "good enough" is the book format most commonly found at the supermarket checkout stand.... I suppose, next we'll hear, that the blinking green cursor on their monitor, is enough color for the rest of us.

Again, I bet these are the same people who on other sites, rile against Flash and Java, or PDF on the Web, and smugly claim, that those who use these technologies don't know what they are doing. And they usually hate Apple, because..., oh, who cares.

E-reader technology will fast move beyond tiny, monochrome screens and weak processors. With mass production, comes general standardization of screen sizes, and resolutions.

More people read newspapers and magazines, than books. Readers will only become truly mass market items, when they can handle such publications, in full color, as well as books (and probably video, and web).

So, you need a format, which can handle complex layouts, such as magazines and newspapers, as well as books. Right now, ePub can't do it, and PDF is the only format, which can.

If you want wide adoption, you need less formats, not more. As has been pointed out earlier, much of the current reflowable files are not e-books, they are documents. They look like documents, feel like documents, and have the visual appeal of the early internet.

The bottom like is, only when you can get color, well-designed, effective ads on readers, only then you'll have mass adoption.

And the good news is, then you'll have well-done books, as well. Most likely, in a format like PDF.

[ahi]

Originally Posted by DawnFalcon

You are, quite litterally, a relic of another age in books.

Just saw this little gem...

I'm a little too young to be a relic of another age in books.

- Ahi

[EowynCarter]

And tagged PDFs already reflow well enough, I understand... so there's your solution to people reading on devices that aren't worth reading on. All without ePub... to the horror of everyone.

Pdf is meant to have FIXED content on one page. That why you like pdf so much. Reflow goes against everything pdf is meant for, as such, i'm not sure it would really work all right.

And my opus IS a device worth reading on. E-book are not paper books. What is the best solution for p-book is not necessarily for e-books. They are different format with differents possibilities.
E-books can have advantage paper book don't have (changing font size according to your liking), why not use it ?

If you want wide adoption, you need less formats, not more. As has been pointed out earlier, much of the current reflowable files are not e-books, they are documents. They look like documents, feel like documents, and have the visual appeal of the early internet.

Once again, not ePub fault, but the publishers who don't bother editing / proofreading their book. Aven a pdf would look bad in that situation.

[ahammer]

shocked this has gone on for 25 pages...

over all if mobility was not a issue what would win out.. pdf I think
what do I think will win out right now.. epub.

only things I see coming up right now foldable eink or wearable hud
both I think are more then 10 years out.(maybe 5 for foldable eink. this is more for both to be cost effective then anything as verson of them can be seen/made right now just at the high cost.)

in the long right pdf maybe better but the time line maybe 20 to 30 years before that format would be better.

to sum this up if you could have a 5" display in your pocket or a 9" for the same size- waight. everyone going to take the 9 unless the cost is to high.

even saying all this and the a format like pdf will win out.. I will buy epub.. a dynamc format into a fix easy with not loss from the dynamc.. but from a fix format to dynamc most of the time is unreadable.