Re: PDF ebooks

From: "Paulo Ney de Souza" 
>  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).
<snip>
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

Now *that* sounds like something to do on a boring Chistmas Eve ;-).

The more I read here and on other lists, the more I too think pdf is one of the sanest formats. For the small publisher it does seem increasingly that the big throughput retailers are not a good deal. This raises a lot of marketing challenges. While some readers - and I know there are a number on ebook community - may think the efforts in designing into other formats are worth it to increase the number of works available and for access via reading devices, it is looking less like a workable business model with the ebook contracts offered by companies like Amazon and B&N. 

That may appear to narrow the market for such publishers, but each one will have to judge whether they can access their niche public without those etailers. If they can, then few of the formats [ each needing  considerable work for anything other than straight text, and more than enough sork for text] make business sense. 

This brings another point that Paulo is mentioning. Whether the kind of design that print books need is also an asset with ebooks. If it is - and remember this is not a matter of any on person's personal preference - then again it is the pdf that is the most friendly to that.

Joseph

Joseph Harris is Smile Poet
Mailing list [email protected]
http://smilepoet.com     [email protected]


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