ebooks and pdf?

[Richard Pieri]

On Apr 12, 2011, at 7:35 AM, Chris O'Connell wrote:
> 
> one notable exception.  I won't be pirating my books, but I don't like the
> idea of being tied to one device or company (The kindle for example, or BN &
> their crappy nook).  I want PDF portability.

PDF isn't portable.  It makes assumptions about page and display sizes that simply don't hold in the portable/mobile arena.

Amazon's Kindle software runs on almost as many platforms as Adobe's Reader, and there is Wine for the rest.  The book format, AZW, is a minor variant of Mobipocket's MOBI format which is based on the Open eBook open specification.

B&N uses ePUB as its foundation with the Adobe Digital Editions DRM latched onto it.  At this time, ePUB is a vastly more widely supported container than PDF.  And as with Kindle, the ADE software runs in wine for those edge cases.

Both ePUB and AZW/MOBI are infinitely more portable than PDF.  They don't make assumptions about displays so books look good no matter what you read them on.  ePUB addresses many of the shortcomings of MOBI and as a rule the ePUB version will look better on more devices than the MOBI version, especially if you find yourself doing format conversions.

And there is FBReader, which can read and display unencumbered MOBI and ePUB files equally well.  The only reason to use PDF is if you need DTF containers.

(DTF = Dead Tree Format, used extensively for hard copy distribution.)

--Rich P.