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Will Sony’s forthcoming e-book reader do PDF?
December 31, 2005 | 6:40 am
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By David Rothman
Not my favorite format–but better than Sony’s own proprietary alternative. Details from BusinessWeek Online. I’ve mentioned the machine before, but in fairness to Sony I did want to highlight the PDF possibility. What Sony does have going for it: Many people will buy first and ask questions later. Meanwhile a BW excerpt:
Users will be able to load any .pdf file onto the reader, according to a person familiar with the device, as well as files with a special Sony e-book format. That means you’ll be able to read everything from magazine articles to analyst reports to out-of-copyright books.
Problem is that PDF itself is a proprietary format that Adobe can change whenever it wants. And in commercial books it tends to come with obnoxious DRM. Furthermore, regardless of conjecture to the contrary, you can bet that Sony will try to steer people to its format even if it in fact does offer PDF.
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Comments:
Although the native support for pdf is a good thing, it will bring a big problem.
Nowadays when a pdf file is made it is mainly targeted for paper, paginated with a specific paper size (a4, a5,..).
The problem here is that the text of this pdfs will be really small on the 6 inch screen of the Librie, just try printing a page from any pdf to this size
Although there are some tools on the yahoo Librie group that help with this issue, i seriously doubt any “regular” user will be willing to that much effort…
Actually, I believe PDF is not a closed format, although it is proprietary – so in that respect it’s better than, say, MS Word format. Anyone can write their own readers and writers for PDF, so unless Adobe makes radical changes and closes the spec, the situation won’t be as dire as other formats.
I would still rather see some form of XML/HTML support, though, since that tends to be a lot more lightweight and flexible than PDF.
Happy New Year, Bingle. Yes, Adobe is capable of making radical changes, believe me. Meanwhile, if nothing else, consider the combination of a proprietary format and the usual proprietary DRM. Could you make your own reader to read DRMed best-sellers? At OpenReader we intend to be far, far more flexible.
Happy New Year.
PDF doesn’t seem to be much of a problem to me, for the hoped-for audience — that is, most readers, who have never bought or used eBooks. They will be surely delighted to see each screen look just like a mass paperback ‘page’ with page number, header, type ‘just like in a book’ and even illustrations.
These eBooks will need to be formatted especially for the Sony device, but so what? Again, Sony is hoping that big Publishers will sign on for this, and for them a simple XSLT magic will whip up a pdf to spec.
Sure, Adobe could decide to release a new spec for pdf that is incompatibnle with the Sony device. But in the meanwhile the old spec format will work just fine.
I am a bit worried that ONLY pdf and the yet-another-Sony-proprietary formats will be supported. Even the iPod also supports mp3; and as for Sony’s first iPod challengers (which only supported Sony’s audio codecs and not mp3) — well, they bombed, and Sony grudgingly allowed mp3 on later devices. So Sony should have learned from that eh? Just hope that for Sony pdf does not equal mp3 in this case.
Myself, I can only hope that this device becomes a huge, huge smash hit, bringing MicroSoft back in with new pocket pc’s to compete, and all sorts of Chinese, Korean, and Japanese competitors — and many of these will support (x)html reading, Plucker, rtf, doc, and even plain old text.
Come on, Sony!
PDf is open enough to be acceptable here. While Adobe retains control of what the standard is, the standard is free to be implemented in other software applications. It would not be in Adobe’s interests at all to create a new version of Acrobat simply to freeze out a specific application – the whole point of pdf in the first place is to be as cross-platform as possible.
Not all PDF documents have to be formatted for a specific paper size. Tagged doccuments allow reformatting, and that is how much text pdfs are made.
It is not a requirement for pdf files to be drm’d. Commercial publishers will likely do this, but again it is not a defect of the file format, but of a specific implementation of it.
As I’ve said before, the ability to display native html without any processing or conversion will be the make or break of any ebook device.