A silly question: what is the advantage of ePub for a reader?

[K-Thom]

Doing so necessarily comes at the cost of any hope of decent typography... which is the cornerstone of bookmaking.

Welcome to the World of [E]-Books! As dmikov stated above, the making of a book is more than mere typesetting. Typesetting concedes to the medium, not the content. There is no specific medium in eBook format. Different devices, different screens sizes, landscape or horizontal.

Do you think an author ever thinks about the typesetting when he/she is typing a book? Never place form over content, or you'll fall for the shell!

[Penforhire]

I need another "cogent" argument against PDF? That's lobbing a softball. How is a PDF supposed to display equally well to my eyes on a 5", 6" and 8" e-reader? It can't. Of course an e-book has to reflow easily AND allow me to choose my own font(s). Arguing otherwise is like arguing that you don't like e-books at all.

PDF is an attempt to force e-books to be good at what p-books are good for (faithful representation of an entire format). Cory D wrote several well-phrased essays on why that is pure foolishness and I agree with him. E-books need to be good at display on MY device. I don't care what effort you put into kerning your text so it looks awesome in PDF.

[griffonwing]

A lot of PDFs are made today that are specific to MONITOR dimensions, instead of A4 or Letter. In this manner, you have one page per Laptop screen, without the need to scroll down to see the bottom 1/3 of the paper. I have a couple RPG files like that.

[wodin]

Originally Posted by Sonist

Hm, I am sure there were some, who made similar arguments, when the Web was all text-based, most computer monitors were 8" or less and monochromatic, and DOS was cool....

And now, the poor souls are faced with OS X and fixed layout web pages, and Flash....

But, they should look on the bright side: now there is also internet porn, on big, color monitors..., 'cause they have no chance of getting laid otherwise.

The web was NEVER all text based. The internet was before html was invented, but the WWW had graphics from the git go. Of course it was a bit slow over a 300 baud modem, and most html authors stuck mostly to text in order to keep page loads under a minute or so. We had to wait for V.90 before anyone could conveniently surf for porn.

[Hellmark]

Originally Posted by Sonist

Hm, I am sure there were some, who made similar arguments, when the Web was all text-based, most computer monitors were 8" or less and monochromatic, and DOS was cool....

And now, the poor souls are faced with OS X and fixed layout web pages, and Flash....

But, they should look on the bright side: now there is also internet porn, on big, color monitors..., 'cause they have no chance of getting laid otherwise.

I don't even know where to start here. So much is offensive.

As mentioned before, the web was never text only. Precursors to the internet were, but the "world wide web" always had images. The internet also postdates when "most computer monitors were 8" or less and monochomatic". The internet was created in 1989, not 1969.

Back then, it wasn't that such and such was cool, or what ever, it was "hey, look what I made my computer do". We created then. People had intelligence. Here you are, talking about people that were on the absolute bleeding edge of things, but acting as if they are luddites.

As far as getting some action, I lived and was part of computers then, and still am, but I'm probably getting laid more often than you are.

[Moejoe]

This thread is mute now that Sony has gone exclusive with ePub PDF is not the choice for ebooks, especially not now

[LDBoblo]

Originally Posted by Hellmark

I don't even know where to start here. So much is offensive.

As mentioned before, the web was never text only. Precursors to the internet were, but the "world wide web" always had images. The internet also postdates when "most computer monitors were 8" or less and monochomatic". The internet was created in 1989, not 1969.

Back then, it wasn't that such and such was cool, or what ever, it was "hey, look what I made my computer do". We created then. People had intelligence. Here you are, talking about people that were on the absolute bleeding edge of things, but acting as if they are luddites.

As far as getting some action, I lived and was part of computers then, and still am, but I'm probably getting laid more often than you are.

I'm not too enthusiastic about these computer/internet analogies, as I don't think the ebook world has yet evolved to the "lime green on blaze orange" sensibility that gave me nightmares in the Geocities/Tripod era.

I guess the development of CSS may have some parallels, as I was doing design on occasion when CSS started displacing complex invisible table formats. Implementation was often poor, interoperability was pretty bad, and a lot of users from the old school of web design dismissed stylesheets altogether.

I still know some web designers who dislike CSS but think of it and xml and php and everything as necessary evils. I eventually hopped on the CSS train and though it's still not platform independent, it's a lot closer since IE6 is being phased out.

Rigid format options are one of the attractions to a book for me. It's not for others, and that's fine. Some of us were there complaining about the shift to printed type which naturally cannot offer the expressiveness of a well-trained calligraphic hand with a brush or the sense of quality and confidence derived from well-chiseled stone could not be replicated on silk or paper.

I think there will always be die-hard adherents to older format conventions, and I'm likely to be included in that group. Even so, I don't mind some evolution of the written word. Just as ligatures and kerning are a development in moveable type, there will be room for designers, typographers, etc. to develop the digital bookface. New solutions must be made to accommodate for the problems that arise in the nature of the format. Some of the PDF adherents here are simply that way because a large portion of the design world has intentionally turned its back on ebooks and ebook readers thus far, and the current formatting solutions are incredibly unrefined and underdeveloped. As the display technologies become less inferior and the medium becomes more feasible, I've no doubt that the formats will be scrutinized more closely and evolution will commence.

Most of us who are typographic snobs don't mind a bit of work in resetting books ourselves. There are some things that could be done to make the task slightly more efficient, but in general I don't have a big problem converting my LIT or RTF files to a much higher quality rigid PDF.

[Alfy]

I'll throw my two cents in this "PDF against the world discussion":

When I first bought my Sony reader, I had a bunch of books in various formats I wanted to transfer. I used inDesign to do the work: I created a page template based on the Sony's screen, and laid out the text, including nice chapter titles, lettrines and so on. To this day, these ebooks are the best I possess in terms of typographical quality. Great, hourray for PDF.

But then of course, what would happen if I switched from my PRS-505 to the soon to come PRS-300? How would my books fare when moved from a 6" screen to a 5" one? Or what if I move to a Kindle DX? Sure, my books would still look fine, not a coma out of place, but I don't think they would be very enjoyable to read. Come on, just imagine if editors published paperbacks that were just downsized versions of hardbacks... Would you enjoy reading tiny print text???

So yes, PDF is a printing format. Sure, you can display it on various computer screens' sizes, but the doc only specifies what it looks like on a set page size, and THERE IS NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT THAT. So, if you want comfort, you'll zoom in or out to read it. The only way for PDFs to be a proper option for ebooks is if they were published in various versions that fit your reader's screen size, each edited for that screen size, pretty much the same way and paperbacks are edited separatly to fit. Well, and here come the two cents: "thanks, but no, thank you".

[Barcey]

Originally Posted by Sonist

Hm, see if you can find the word "printing" in the main wikipedia definition:

"Portable Document Format (PDF) is a file format created by Adobe Systems in 1993 for document exchange. PDF is used for representing two-dimensional documents in a manner independent of the application software, hardware, and operating system.
Each PDF file encapsulates a complete description of a fixed-layout 2D document (and, with Acrobat 3D, embedded 3D documents) that includes the text, fonts, images, and 2D vector graphics which compose the documents.
Formerly a proprietary format, PDF was officially released as an open standard on July 1, 2008, and published by the International Organization for Standardization as ISO/IEC 32000-1:2008."

Your argument is kind of like claiming, that a paper book sucks, because you' miss the ability to reflow and print the manuscript on 3x3" paper on your office printer.

And, yes, you CAN print plain text files too, but it doesn't make it a "format for printing.".

It's further down...

The PDF combines three technologies:

* A subset of the PostScript page description programming language, for generating the layout and graphics.
* A font-embedding/replacement system to allow fonts to travel with the documents.
* A structured storage system to bundle these elements and any associated content into a single file, with data compression where appropriate.

It was built from the Postscript page description language mentality where you layout the page to a specific page size. It would work fine if the PDF was created for the 6" screen but then you'd have to download a new PDF if you want to read on a 10" screen.

The alternatives of zooming and panning are processor intensive and don't work well on the low power consumption processors in the current generation of dedicated readers.

[Sonist]

The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away. And sometimes, the Lord never giveth.

I am speaking about typography sensitivity, of course. Which is most often synonymous, with one's ability to get laid. And apparently, with one's ability to spot humor.

I say to you, the day is nigh, when large screens will come to rule the ebook world, and typography and good design, will return to reclaim their rightful throne.

And those who do not repent, and renounce their false formats, shall be cast into the dark abyss, where they will for eternity be suffocated by bad kerning, impaled on sharp hyphens, and drowned in an ever reflowing sea of terrible fonts.

[K-Thom]

Verily, I say to thee, thou shalt not fold thy reading device, which mayeth indeed be thine obligation since the one device which may bestow upon thee a faint hope to incarnate the format, which name shalt not be called, truly will be too huge a burden for any peasant's pocket.

Thou, by all lights that shine upon thee, have forsworn all enlightened formats advised to thee by those who tread through the darketh path of the abyss called the Adobe PDF before thee.

So, cometh back to us, and embrace the one called epub. 'tis where thine future lies.

[Abecedary]

What amazes me about this discussion (if it can be called that) is that so many of you can't seem to see the pros and cons of each of the formats. Yes, ePub (and other ebook formats) have their strengths, but they also have some major weaknesses. And yes, PDF has it's strengths, but it also has its weaknesses (specifically with regards to reflowability).

Too many of you seem to take a ridiculous black and white worldview where things simply can't coexist with each other and work well in their own niches for which they're best suited. Instead, you'd rather take a slash and burn approach to the world and destroy everything that's come before, including the lessons that were (supposedly) learned along the way.

[HarryT]

PDF absolutely has its strengths. Unfortunately, the viewing of reflowable content on different-sized screens is not what it was designed to do, and it's very poor at doing it.

What it is designed for is the accurate reproduction of a document on a specific sized page. It does that task extremely well.

[Syniurge]

(Sorry, I'm answering to the original post )

Originally Posted by Terisa de morgan

Hi,

I've listened so wonderful words about words that I would like to know which is the real advantage for a common reader person. I'm not talking about standard (I know html history and other standard, and I work with theoretical standards, so please, don't go there). No DRM is not a real reason, because it doesn't depend on format. So, which is its advantage over other formats? For a reader, remember, not a techie.

ePub has everything that the previous de-facto standard Mobipocket lacks: vector graphics (scalable without loss), font embedding (e.g Kindle are atm restricted to Western languages, and even with the various font hacks, problem is that there can be only one font at the same time, and no single font is able to handle all languages; font embedding would make everything simpler and not restrict to a particular range of charsets), much more formatting features, and is a mix of existing and widely used open standards.

Unfortunately Amazon isn't getting much pressure from the Kindle masses to support ePub.. However if they want to look serious when pushing Kindle into universities and schools they better remedy to it.

[Icarusbop]

Originally Posted by K-Thom

No, it can't. Ever tried it? Don't. It's not a pretty sight. And don't let me get into multi-column text pdfs ...

I still favor txt files. They're all an ebook file should be. Universal, open, non-proprietary, flexible, easily convertible, small. In short: they definitely ain't pdf ...

Txt files are not very good for book which contain bold or Italic or both. quite a lot of authors are using bold and italics to stress points in their story, this is lost in a txt file.