Three Ways to not use promotional ebooks

[Riocaz]

Originally Posted by ahi

JSWolf, am I correct in assuming your dislike for PDF stems largely (or wholly?) from the fact that the paper size is generally incorrectly set either to letter size or to whatever size the physical book uses? Resulting in too small to read and difficult to aesthetically reflow garbage on most second generation ePaper based devices?

Whats the point of a promotion thats all but unusable to it's target audience...

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by ahi

JSWolf, am I correct in assuming your dislike for PDF stems largely (or wholly?) from the fact that the paper size is generally incorrectly set either to letter size or to whatever size the physical book uses? Resulting in too small to read and difficult to aesthetically reflow garbage on most second generation ePaper based devices?

That and the fact that converting from a novel in PDF cannot be done without errors. The format is a really poor one to use to give away free eBooks. If a publisher and/or author wants me to read, give me something I want to read. PDF is not it.

[PhishStyx]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I've stopped downloading these free "eBooks" that are in PDF.

You could, you know, get a reader that will read PDF's.

Just a thought.

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by PhishStyx

You could, you know, get a reader that will read PDF's.

Just a thought.

He's got one. And if publisher's PDFs were formatted with 3.5" x 4.75" pages and quarter-inch margins all around, he might not object so much. (There's still problems; many publishers don't put good metadata in their PDFs, nor bookmarks that become the Reader's TOC, and some use atrocious fonts for reading on a screen.) Of course, almost nobody wants to read PDFs that size on their computer screens, and the publishers aren't releasing "ebook PDFs"--they're releasing "our ready-for-print document, which hey, you can read on your computer!"

Most "free ebook" PDFs are 6x9, often with .75 margins; they're only readable on a Sony PRS if you like 5 point type, which is what they look like before reflowing.

Reflowing *at best* loses some formatting and creates annoying half-full pages; at worst, it puts a paragraph break after every line of the original text. And the font size change with reflow is... weird. And inconsistent; a lot depends on the program that was used to make the PDF.

[PhishStyx]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

He's got one. And if publisher's PDFs were formatted with 3.5" x 4.75" pages and quarter-inch margins all around, he might not object so much. (There's still problems; many publishers don't put good metadata in their PDFs, nor bookmarks that become the Reader's TOC, and some use atrocious fonts for reading on a screen.) Of course, almost nobody wants to read PDFs that size on their computer screens, and the publishers aren't releasing "ebook PDFs"--they're releasing "our ready-for-print document, which hey, you can read on your computer!"

Most "free ebook" PDFs are 6x9, often with .75 margins; they're only readable on a Sony PRS if you like 5 point type, which is what they look like before reflowing.

Reflowing *at best* loses some formatting and creates annoying half-full pages; at worst, it puts a paragraph break after every line of the original text. And the font size change with reflow is... weird. And inconsistent; a lot depends on the program that was used to make the PDF.

I'm reasonably confident that the above tells me the Sony does NOT meet my definition of "reading" PDF's although it may well meet Sony's.

[Sweetpea]

Originally Posted by astra

Regarding email address: I have a special spam email address I would give in this case.
Snail address, however, I would not give them.

Same here. But I also have a nice snail address too!




Hmm, just thought about something... Why not enter their address as yours?

[astra]

Originally Posted by Sweetpea

Same here. But I also have a nice snail address too!




Hmm, just thought about something... Why not enter their address as yours?

[PhishStyx]

Originally Posted by Sweetpea

Same here. But I also have a nice snail address too!




Hmm, just thought about something... Why not enter their address as yours?

Oh, that's simply beautiful!

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by PhishStyx

I'm reasonably confident that the above tells me the Sony does NOT meet my definition of "reading" PDF's although it may well meet Sony's.

I gather the 700 can zoom as well as reflow, which would help in some cases. And it works fine on many PDFs. (I'm trying to sort out how tagged vs non-tagged PDFs are different.)

But yeah... the PDF support is poor, unless you either make your own PDFs, or get them from somewhere like Feedbooks.com that formats them to Reader-sized pages. It's not so much the Reader's fault as the various publishers--they don't use the options that are possible for PDFs, that would make them work better on small readers. (Tagging. Bookmarks. Metadata. Cropping out whitespace. And so on.)