

Why e-books will soon be obsolete - baha_man
http://gyrovague.com/2012/04/30/why-e-books-will-soon-be-obsolete-and-no-its-not-just-because-of-drm/

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tomku
I've read a lot of books in the author's preferred formats (PDF and HTML5
websites), and my experience has been mixed.

PDFs are amazing for technical books, and I definitely prefer them for any
kind of book with diagrams, code samples or pictures. However, every time I've
tried to read fiction in PDF, it's been a miserable experience because support
for reflowing/resizing text in PDFs is primitive or non-existent. The vast
majority of PDFs are formatted for a fixed size, and are practically
unreadable if you don't have at least a ~10 inch screen and an easy way to pan
around. Mobi/ePub books avoid these problems, and are readable equally well on
a 15" laptop or a 7" Kindle.

HTML5 is closer to the mark for fiction, because you can make an HTML5 website
look great on virtually anything that has a modern browser. Here, the problem
is that the nature of HTML5 makes it hard to produce a sellable product. When
I buy a book, I want it in some kind of format that I can download and take
with me, not a website that I need to authenticate to. Since the author says 5
years, I guess it's possible that the changes necessary will have occurred by
then, but I think that it's more likely that e-books will be published in
KF8/ePub3 and read on tablets and dedicated readers using specialized
software, just like they are now.

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sswezey
The author doesn't seem to know what he wants. He complains about ePub using
technology that is fourteen years old (which works fine) and then touts a 'no
frills PDF' as the solution for a linear fiction novel. A novel doesn't need
anything fancier than a 14 year old technology - it's paper version has been
using (roughly) the same technology for ~500 years.

He also complains about Apple's App Store and its regional scope and then lump
that in with eBooks too. Most ebook sellers don't care where you are buying
from, as long as they get paid. I can buy a Kindle book from any Amazon domain
and it works on my Kindle fine. Amazon doesn't care about this, Apple is
imposing an artificial barrier on his ebooks.

