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By David Rothman

Adobe logoPDF is toxic to e-books. It makes them an ugly afterthought. Adobe created PDF not to help the e-book business but rather for other purposes such as reproduction of business documents.

Tempted by the number of people with Adobe-loaded computers, some e-book publishers have succumbed to the idea of simply going with a popular format. In most cases, however, such as for recreational reading, PDF is pathetic compared to more modern, better-looking alternatives such as PDA-friendly Mobipocket.

Below, edited, is part of a thoughtful post that NetWorker wrote for the eBook Community list. – David Rothman

I remain convinced that the large number of electronic documents in PDF format is not a result of any inherent superiority of the format, but rather the fact that if you prepare a print document using Acrobat as a desktop publishing tool you essentially have a free electronic version in the PDF file. Seeing as how up until now there is little profit in selling an electronic version of a printed document, it also makes sense to satisfy the desire for an electronic version at the lowest cost possible.

Miserliness favored over readable format

I know that this was the explicit reasoning of at least two of the small companies I have worked for when deciding to issue product documentation in PDF format. And I have seen no evidence to suggest that the prevalence of PDF documents in the marketplace exists for those electronic documents which have no print counterpart.

Unfortunately, this decision leads to a great deal of consumer disatisfaction, to the general view that “e-books will never catch on,” and the feeling that “I can’t stand to read on my computer monitor.”

Vs. HTML and other alternatives

Despite the raw numbers of PDF documents, I have never heard any consumer say, “Boy, I sure wish this HTML (or eReader) file were available in PDF!”

Thus, for the sake of expedience, small print publishers have been poisoning public perception of the benefits of e-books…

PDF is a page layout format, as opposed to a document definition format. I have a 20″ Trinitron monitor at 1600×1200 resolution, a 13″ laptop at 1024×768 resolution and a 2.5″x3.25″ PocketPC at 240×320 resolution. Is it unreasonable to expect a single file that can be adequately displayed on all these devices? And is it reasonable to expect publishers to produce dozens of PDF files each optimized for the physical characteristics of every display device, together with the permutations of font sizes that different people need?

Inflexible page layout paradigm

I am an unabashed detractor of the PDF format, but not because I don’t believe that some people like and even prefer them, but because I don’t think that they satisfy the majority of consumers’ needs and desires. I haven’t seen a single PDF document that couldn’t be satisfactorily encoded in XHTML+CSS and avoiding the inflexibility of a page layout paradigm.

 
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