ebooks and pdf?

[Bill Bogstad]

On Tue, Apr 12, 2011 at 7:56 AM, Laura Conrad <lconrad-O0WJhd4tT3hg9hUCZPvPmw at public.gmane.org> wrote:
>>>>>> "Chris" == Chris O'Connell <omegahalo-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> writes:
>
>    Chris> I'm adamant about buying only ebooks from now on.  The
>    Chris> problem is that very few publishers provide their books in a
>    Chris> DRM free format.  O'Reilly is one notable exception.
>
> Baen is another.
>
>    Chris> I won't be pirating my books, but I don't like the idea of
>    Chris> being tied to one device or company (The kindle for example,
>    Chris> or BN & their crappy nook).  I want PDF portability.
>
>    Chris> Any suggestions?
>
> PDF is good for portability between large devices, but for reading on
> small screens, you'd really rather have something that reflows to fit
> the screen, like html or epub.

>From my experience so far with the Kindle, even ebook formats don't work
that well for books with lots of images, charts, graphs, etc.  I think the
screen on such devices is just too small to do this well.   The Kindle screen
isn't even as big as a mass market paperback and it seems rare to see
anything published in that format which depends on content which isn't
reflowable.  Even when I select the inline graphics to 'zoom' them, they are
often still hard to view and doing so disturbs the reading process.  I really
want to look at the graphic at the same time that I'm reading the text.

Admittedly, this could be peculiar to the books/device (Kindle) that I'm using
and it may work better on other similar sized devices.   If the Kindle
did away with its keyboard and went to a touchscreen, it could at least
increase it's screen to the size of a mass market paperback which would
help some, but probably not enough.  Since I hoped to read technical
publications
on my 'book'  reader, I think I see a tablet of some sort in my future.

Bill Bogstad