Personally, I think we should give the readers whatever it takes to get them to read. . . . If they want certain formats en masse, we should try to provide. mh On Wed, 26 Jan 2011, Jim Adcock wrote:

I have no interest in your games BB. I was talking about PG, not BB, and what PG customers actually need for a happy experience. Which is HTML, or its derived formats EPUB and/or MOBI, not PDF, which is a paper descriptor format. Ebook Readers already have renderers for HTML, EPUB, and/or MOBI, as anyone who owns one knows, thus there is no need to render HTML, EPUB, or MOBI into something else.

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Not that such conversion programs are not helpful, but in a case of redoing a whole book, I think WE should do it ONCE, right.

The problem with doing PDF "once" and "right" as I see it, is that there are more than one kind of customer for PDF files, each of which has very different idea of what doing it "right" means. Most commonly what one sees in the US for PDF files is paper page expectation of 8.5 x 11 inches US with about 1 inch margins. Which is fine for technical documents in the US, but not for novels, and also is not a particularly good choice for the European customer, nor is it a particularly good choice for say iPad or other eBook Reader users. In Europe you would want an A4 size, and if you try to print out an A4 document on a 8.5 x 11 printer, or an 8.5 x 11 document on an A4 printer, one not uncommonly runs into printer problems. And why are we even talking about say "8.5 x 11" ? Because PDF *IS* a paper descriptor format, it IS NOT an eBook Format. For novels a "half page" size of PDF 5.5 x 8.5 or half-page A4 more appropriately fits say an iPad or a Kindle DX. But, it still doesn't fit well into "wide-screen HDTV" style pad devices such as the Galaxy tab. The next issue is should the PDF have margins or not and if so how wide. The issue of "margins" is often designed into eBook Readers where the mechanical design of the eBook Reader includes the appearance of margins as designed into the hardware packaging in which case the PDF document SHOULD NOT also include margins lest you end up with "margins inside margins" leading to little usable actual display space. Further, often one sees novels in PDF 8.5 x 11 format with the thought that people can "just" use their printer parameters (if they are clever enough) to print those pages out 2-up rotated on one page. But PDF printers usually force an additional margin in this mode, leading to the "margins within margins" problem again, leading to undersized readable areas in the print-out. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that fonts designs DO NOT simply scale linearly, but rather if you print out a document simply "photographically reduced" such as PDF printers do in "2 up" mode, then fonts reduced in size the fonts end up looking "too light" -- and PDF fonts have the problem that they are typically specified too light in the first place leading to fonts that are "too light TIMES too light" leading to "2 up" PDF glyphs in practice being virtually unreadable -- for example if I try these "tricks" on my PDF printer the glyphs actually break up leaving gaps with no toner in the middle of glyphs. Further a 50% scaling and rotation of a 8.5 x 11 document DOES NOT fit properly in a 5.5 x 8.5 space. So, if one were to try to "do it right" re PDF, I think you end up with at least the requirement of 8 different document formats: 8.5 x 11 with margins 8.5 x 11 without margins A4 with margins A4 without margins 5.5 x 8.5 with margins 5.5 x 8.5 without margins Half-page A4 with margins Half-page A4 without margins And of course none of this works on phone-based readers with smaller displays -- you still need something along the size of at least a Galaxy pad. And now comes the hard part: You have to teach customers WHICH of these file formats is the correct file format for what they want to do. Of course, reflowable format documents, such as HTML, EPUB, MOBI, etc -- virtually ALL modern file formats excepting PDF -- DO NOT have these problems. People simply tell their eBook Reader ONCE what their preferences are, and thereafter the machine simply displays the document the way the CUSTOMER says they want the document displayed. So, again, the idea the eBooks should be printed back out again on paper (or specified using a paper descriptor format) seems silly to me -- unless you want to set up relationships with instant printers, who are in the business of understanding these issues, and who can print and bind and deliver instant books to customers cheaper and faster than the customer can do it themselves. If you DO want to set up relationships with instant printers, then I think these ideas are fine -- but you then segregate the PDF file formats away from your eBook formats into a technical area for PDF professional printers (and advanced printer geeks) so that the average customer doesn't have to get confused by all these crazily necessary file formats.