Just Curious about old ebook formats

[Katsunami]

For this once, I'm agreeing with JSWolf.

If plain text is an e-book format, you can count every document containing text to be an e-book. Plain Text, doc, docx, pdf, rtf... everything.

In my view, an e-book format is a format specifically designed to be able to:

1. Allow reflowable text
2. Mimic a real book, including markup, images, front cover, and metadata such as author, title, blurb...
3. Be read on devices with varying screen sizes, mainly due to feature 1, and/or by repositioning images.

PDF: Very often missing feature 1, and thus feature 3.
Plain Text: Missing feature 2 entirely.
RTF: Missing parts of feature 2 (no images, can have comments in the text, but not all implementations support metadata AFAIK)
doc/docx: Like PDF, often misses feature 1 and/or 3.

It's true you can use files such as TXT, PDF, or RTF as e-books (and I think RTF would actually be the best here), but they were never designed with that goal in mind, and thus to me, they're not e-book formats. Using those files as e-books is the same as using Excel as a database: possible, but not as it was intended.

[sjfan]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

PDF is not an eBook.

https://www.thebookdesigner.com/2016...isnt-an-ebook/

That article is a great example of the tail wagging the dog into a No True Scotsman argument.

[Katsunami]

Oh, and with regard to old formats, I only have a large amount of LIT-files stashed away on the BAEN Free CD's, which I all have. Once I sort out the books I want and import them into calibre, those will be converted to EPUB and cleaned/changed/enhanced where necessary.

[barryem]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

PDF is not an eBook.

https://www.thebookdesigner.com/2016...isnt-an-ebook/

Your link points to a page where he begins referencing an earlier article in which he stated an ebook format is an epub. I'm not sure that qualifies as a reference in a world where Kindle dominates.

By the way, gutenberg.org, the website started by Michael Hart, the inventor of the book, which distributes ebooks, not only distributed them only in text for a long time, it still distributes them in text format. Obviously they think text is an ebook format. So do I.

Barry

[barryem]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

For this once, I'm agreeing with JSWolf.

If plain text is an e-book format, you can count every document containing text to be an e-book. Plain Text, doc, docx, pdf, rtf... everything.

I don't think that follows. Every document isn't an ebook. Just the ones that contain text that is intended to be read as if it was a book is an ebook. Web pages contain text and aren't ebooks. I have a text list of the videos on my tablets that isn't an ebook. I could easily make it into one (which, now that I think of it, might not be a bad idea) but as it stands it's a list of videos.

In my view, an e-book format is a format specifically designed to be able to:

1. Allow reflowable text

Some PDF's allow reflowing. Plain text files are reflowable. And why is this a defining quality of an ebook? It's a desirable quality but I don't think it's a necessity.

2. Mimic a real book, including markup, images, front cover, and metadata such as author, title, blurb...

Why? Granted those are often qualities of ebooks but I don't think any of them are defining qualities.

3. Be read on devices with varying screen sizes, mainly due to feature 1, and/or by repositioning images.

PDF: Very often missing feature 1, and thus feature 3.
Plain Text: Missing feature 2 entirely.
RTF: Missing parts of feature 2 (no images, can have comments in the text, but not all implementations support metadata AFAIK)
doc/docx: Like PDF, often misses feature 1 and/or 3.

It's true you can use files such as TXT, PDF, or RTF as e-books (and I think RTF would actually be the best here), but they were never designed with that goal in mind, and thus to me, they're not e-book formats. Using those files as e-books is the same as using Excel as a database: possible, but not as it was intended.

Well, let's see if I can do what you did! What makes a car a car? It should have wheels. Therefore a stripped down car is not a car. It should be red. Any self respecting car is red. It should carry at least 6 people, therefore sports cars are not cars.

Hey that's pretty easy. Thanks for teaching me how.

Barry

[Cinisajoy]

There are txt ebooks. Therefore txt can be an ebook format.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

PDF is not an eBook.

https://www.thebookdesigner.com/2016...isnt-an-ebook/

Interesting but fallacious. By his standards, a fixed layout epub would not be considered an ebook format -- after all, it is not reflowable which is his major objection to PDF. Not to mention his statement about converting a FLO epub to a standard epub is pretty risible -- I've done it and it ain't pretty nor is it a straightforward process. Admittedly, I'm assuming that what he refers to as a "fixed format" epub is what the rest of the world calls a fixed layout epub.

As for uploading them to major ebook retailers? Try explaining that the ebook you want to sell is a fixed layout epub3 which will need special renaming to work as intended on a Kobo touch interface ereader and will look very strange on most other ereaders (other than Kindles which won't display them at all). Apple/iBooks will accept them but the Apple fixed layout format has some differences from the IDPF fixed layout standard -- one local children's books author was swearing at those differences a few months back.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

For this once, I'm agreeing with JSWolf.

2. Mimic a real book, including markup, images, front cover, and metadata such as author, title, blurb...

Hmmm so the first few lines of a text file I have around that state:

Title: Three Men in a Boat
       (to say nothing of the dog)


Author: Jerome K. Jerome



Release Date: October 19, 2010  [eBook #308]
First Posted: August 28, 1995

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

doesn't qualify as the author, title, language, etc. "metadata"? The next page titled Preface is not a blurb for the book? Images? Not a strength for a text file but then I've read quite a few dead tree books which lacked cover images or images mixed with the text. Ah... the good old days of woodcuts. Hmmm... a lot of words and phrases with _ at each end. By Jove! _Italics_!

BTW, this was the first file I remember downloading from Gutenberg.

Please note that I am not arguing that PDF is a good ebook format but rather that it is an ebook format. Jon seems to be falling into the Hasty Generalization fallacy as I remember from the old days on a school debate club. "I read one news item that said that Nixon was a great president so he must be a great president." without considering all the evidence from multiple sources.

Hmmmm... to quote Robert Heinlein from Glory Road: Vox Populi, Vox Dei translates as: “My God! How did we get in this mess!”

And George Santayana from "Reason in Common Sense: Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it often misquoted as Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Mentioning Tricky Dick brought back memories.

[mbovenka]

Originally Posted by drjd

Honestly, never heard before.

Proprietary to Jinke/Hanlin, IIRC. And indeed, I don't think anybody ever actually used it.

[Solitaire1]

Originally Posted by barryem

Pdb was the Palm extension for data files and there was no format specified. They could contain data in any form whatever, including plain text or text in a markup language or compressed text or even images. There were only 2 extensions possible on Palms, .pdb and .prc. The first, .pdb, was intended for data and .prc was intended for executables but as I recall neither was enforced and they were interchangeable. And I think either could contain anything.

So yes, you can have formatting in pdb files. I think you're right that books from ereader.com did have some formatting. Most of the early Palm ebooks were simply plain text that had been compressed and put into a pdb file.

Barry

The e-book format using the .pdb extension was basically a simplified version of HTML (used simple tags but no paragraph tags, you could separate the paragraphs with hard-space indents or a blank line) that allowed formatting such as bold and italic. It also allowed links within the e-book. You could markup the text in a text editor and use a program provided by Palm to convert it into a .pdb file for loading on your Palm OS PDA. Palm also provided a program that allowed you to edit the text file and it would insert the formatting codes for you and then make the .pdb ebook.

One limitation was that you could not specify the typeface for the e-book. With Palm ereaders, you would have the fonts (typeface and size) already loaded on your PDA and you would choose which one you wanted.

One of the main reasons for the development of the ebook format for Palm OS PDAs is that there was a 4K limit for notes, which was not practical for e-book. The .pdb ebook format allowed for long ebooks.

[issybird]

Originally Posted by DNSB

Hmmmm... to quote Robert Heinlein from Glory Road: Vox Populi, Vox Dei translates as: “My God! How did we get in this mess!”

This quote is causing me to rethink my attitude toward Heinlein.

[Frenzie]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

PDF is not an eBook.

https://www.thebookdesigner.com/2016...isnt-an-ebook/

From that page:

PDFs can’t be uploaded to any of the major ebook commercial retailer sites and distributors (Amazon, Apple, Nook, Kobo, Smashwords, etc.), so if you want to sell your ebook, you’ll have to create an ePub file.

Call it whatever you want, but I've only bought one single EPUB. The other 295 ebooks I've bought were PDFs and CBZs and I probably would've never bought them if they were in any other format. (Save if they were DjVu.) :P

(Admittedly they are also available in EPUB and sometimes MOBI. I've probably even used an EPUB version once or twice in the unlikely scenario that the PDF wasn't suitable to the ereader.)

I'm actually a little bit shocked that I've bought 296 ebooks since 2014. Oh well, it's because on those Humble Bundle things you're generally just buying a few and the rest is a nice bonus.

[dwig]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

For this once, I'm agreeing with JSWolf.

If plain text is an e-book format, you can count every document containing text to be an e-book. Plain Text, doc, docx, pdf, rtf... everything.

That doesn't follow. Formats that specify a "page" are radically different that reflowable text.

In my view, an e-book format is a format specifically designed to be able to:

1. Allow reflowable text
2. Mimic a real book, including markup, images, front cover, and metadata such as author, title, blurb...
3. Be read on devices with varying screen sizes, mainly due to feature 1, and/or by repositioning images.

I strongly disagree with the first phrase in #2 and hold that everyone who feels the ebook must mimic paper books are idiots stuck in the past. Printers, like Gutenberg, started with that same mindset and were quickly proven wrong. Printed books changed away from slavishly mimicking the hand written and illuminated books that preceded them for good reasons. Typography improved massively over the years.

Keeping similar structure is fine and in most cases a good thing. It can be done adequately in plain text or at least markup text. I do agree that those formats that specify a "page" and loose reflowable text are "documents" and at best stand on the extreme edge of what could be considered an "ebook".

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by sjfan

That article is a great example of the tail wagging the dog into a No True Scotsman argument.

Sorry, but that Wiki is pure BS!

[JSWolf]

Best way to say it. Text can contain an eBook, but is not an eBook format.