“PDF sucks.” We agree with those sentiments from Dorothea Salo and countless others. How unfortunate that the Open eBook Forum now cares more about promoting Adobe PDF and the other proprietary formats of its major backers than about coming up with a Universal Consumer Format for real, live readers. As a friendly reminder to the OeBF of the need for a decent consumer standard–and really, e-bookers, we love the idea of the group, especially if it’ll return to its original vision–we’re reproducing a rather clueful post that fanfiction writer Mary Anne Gruen made to the eBook Community list this week. – David Rothman
I find PDF hell to read. I would avoid any e-books in it like the plague. If my husband didn’t use the program for his work, we’d never download the free reader. It always seems to be a hassle to get it to work. It’s not worth the time and difficulties. We have broadband and plenty of memory, but it takes forever for Adobe 6 to load to read anything. Before it finishes loading, I usually decide the item I was going to read wasn’t worth my time and I click it off. I would never pay money to read anything on it. It costs too much already.
This program is good for paper printing uses where its layout is easier to read and appreciate, but it’s not good for reading onscreen. Not unless it becomes very speedy and easy to use. And even then I don’t find most things written in it comfortable to look at onscreen. Things come across as too busy and often too small.
Rich Text Format is a good example of an alternative to PDF. My contact with RTF has been limited to the world of fanfiction, where no one cares about fancy layouts. I’ve used it to pass around book-length pieces (up to 400 pages in a total of say five documents) as attachments to emails and I’ve found it to be the format. Nobody has to download anything (and perhaps fail at it). Programs I’ve never heard of can open RTF in notebook and the reader can begin reading at once. It has real ease of use and reading onscreen is easy as well.
I admit that what I send is pretty straightforward and that I’m not trying to protect it from copying or alteration. There aren’t any footnotes or pictures. So maybe RTF wouldn’t work in all instances. But I have noticed that Baen Books is now offering its free books in RTF, so it must have some flexibility or work in many cases.
Customers need ease in use, or it’s not worth the time in their increasingly busy lives. I’m hearing a lot of former readers who are putting aside reading paper books because they spend all day working on some kind of computer and are tired of looking at print. To lure them back to the computer in-between working hours, ebooks need to offer real convenience and ease of use. They have to be as easy and quick to operate as the remote on the customer’s TV screen and be relaxing to look at. They also need sensible pricing. The New York Times recently noted that half the copies of the recent Harry Potter book were sold in places like Costco where customers bought it for close to $15. Of course, the bad news for all publishers is that they usually didn’t buy any other books while they were there.
More thoughts to add to Mary Anne Gruen’s: The latest Adobe reader offers more options for human readers than previous ones, but it’s still pretty pathetic compared to what it should do. I want human readers to be able to vary everything from the type style to the space between lines. Let the reader be the boss. Have you seen those playful but simultaneously condescending Adobe PDF commercials–showing masses of commuters, students and so on? They pretty well sum up Adobe’s corporate vision of humanity as just a collection of marketing niches rather individuals. When it comes to setting up the conditions for reading text, Adobe would rather that human readers “receive” than “give.” Like Dorothea Salo, I object to PDF’s proprietary nature (think Adobe’s gonna hold an election to decide on the accompanying Digital Rights Management schemes?), but, yes, like Mary Ann, I also continue to find this format to be a horror for readers despite the recent tweaks. – DR
