Re: PDF ebooks

  On 9/26/2010 1:42 PM, Kirk McElhearn wrote:
> On Sep 26, 2010, at 8:21 PM, Paulo Ney de Souza wrote:
>
>>   Does anyone know the reason why Amazon (and Apple) do not allow the
>> sale of ebooks in PDF format ? Both platforms support PDF display, but
>> not the DRM and sales? Is the real reason Adobe royalties requirements ?
> PDFs don't flow as well when you change font sizes.
>
>
> Kirk

Oh yeah! And then there are the PDF's that do NOT flow at ALL! We are 
not talking about Jane Austen here - there is no need to make "Pride and 
Prejudice" in anything other than ePub, Mobi or AZW format, and 
producing it in PDF is just a waste (with the exception that then you 
could choose good fonts instead of the poor typography of both Kindle 
and iPad).

What needs to be addressed is the need for complex formulae, tables, 
diagramming of Math, Physics, Engineering that do NOT reflow - no matter 
what may be done in the future. Given any algorithm for reflowing one 
can find a formula that will not work well under it.

Reflowing due of Font-Size changes should be the least issue to worry 
about - because - the current pulp books are all fixed-font sizes (have 
been for 500 years) and everyone seems to be doing well with them. Given 
a certain size of reading canvas (Kindle, KindleDX, iPad, iPhone, ...) 
book designers can come up with the good fonts/sizes and line breaks 
that allow for a good average display (with reflowing off) and that 
would serve reader and Amazon/Apple way better than the current 
situation.  There are publishers inventing workflows to circumvent those 
restrictions that bear on insanity! Today I bought a book that was 
formatted in AZW by scanning each "word" and "math formulae" into a 
single image and putting thousands of these images together to make a file!

Paulo Ney





<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pride_and_Prejudice>


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