01-16-2018, 08:14 PM | #46 |
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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. Last edited by Katsunami; 01-16-2018 at 08:17 PM. |
01-16-2018, 08:21 PM | #47 | |
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01-16-2018, 08:22 PM | #48 |
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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.
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01-16-2018, 10:12 PM | #49 | |
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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 |
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01-16-2018, 10:25 PM | #50 | ||||
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Hey that's pretty easy. Thanks for teaching me how. Barry |
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01-16-2018, 10:27 PM | #51 |
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There are txt ebooks. Therefore txt can be an ebook format.
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01-17-2018, 01:01 AM | #52 | |
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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. |
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01-17-2018, 01:30 AM | #53 | |
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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) 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. Last edited by DNSB; 01-17-2018 at 01:49 AM. |
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01-17-2018, 03:35 AM | #54 |
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01-17-2018, 07:47 AM | #55 | |
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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. |
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01-17-2018, 10:39 AM | #56 |
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01-17-2018, 03:50 PM | #57 | ||
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(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. |
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01-17-2018, 06:09 PM | #58 | ||
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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". |
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01-17-2018, 06:28 PM | #59 | |
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01-17-2018, 06:31 PM | #60 |
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Best way to say it. Text can contain an eBook, but is not an eBook format.
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