Mel Keegan

The debate about which ebook format -- and which reader device -- is good, better, best, is building up a good head of steam. Perhaps prompted by the release of the iPad earlier this year, the battle has come down to two basic contenders: the PDF (and the readers which favor it), and the Epub (and the readers which favor it.) Steve Jobs went on record as saying, in so many words, that PDF has shot its bolt, its day is done, and that HTML 5 is the way of the future. He might easily be right, at least from the perspective of the major publishers-

But think about this: almost any indie writer or publisher can make very attractive PDFs. The rules constraining the PDF playing field are well understood and easy to follow, and the programs which make PDFs are cheap or even free. Now ... hands up, you indie writers and publishers: who can code in HTML 5?

Now, HTML 5 is the way of the future for Apple, and Marvel Comics and so forth. But if the indie publisher wants to get content packaged attractively and even halfway securely, it's yet another hurdle to get over -- another learning curve to climb, in a life that ain't getting any easier! So before we all dump the PDFs and go out and buy 'The Complete Dummy's Guide to HTML 5,' let's take an other look at PDFs ... and the reader devices that favor them.  

The beauty of the PDF format (at least as most ebook publishers, including my own publisher, DreamCraft, delivers them) is that they don't have a "use-by" date -- you can store ebooks for years and then pull them out and read them -- on virtually any device. Amazon has a conversion service (I think it costs a nickel, which pays for the bandwidth for the upload/download), and there are free conversion services elsewhere online. Also, most reader devices don't even need you to convert the document. BeBook, Palm, Sony, Pocket PC, Netbooks and so forth, all have build-in software for reading PDFs. The iPad is a bit stickier: you access the PDFs from your email account, which means you just need to email your ebooks to yourself -- and the PDF reader program costs about 75c, so I've been told, as a one-off software purchase, downloaded from the iBooks store. (Also, the first generation iPads are starting to change hands for just a couple of hundred dollars as the new generation devices come along). Netbooks and Laptops read PDFs without any issues whatever. 
 
Two more fantastic things about PDFs: the good ebook reader devices have recently had new firmware issued, and the way they handle the PDF documents is now almost infinitely flexible. You could have a PDF which, a few months ago, was more difficult to read because the text size was "locked," and probably far too small, because some idiot formatted an ebook as a Letter-size document, completely forgetting that you need a magnifying glass to read it on a palmtop device. However, the new firmware gives you the ability to shrink or expand the text through ten increments, from very small to absolutely huge.

Problem solved. You can now read anything, no matter how it was originally formatted. Lastly, PDFs can have images embedded, and any reader device worth its salt will display them. Kindle, BeBook and so forth will only display in monochrome, but iPad, Adam, the Netbooks and virtually all of the new tablets and slates which are coming out next year will be in full color. 

This review page is well worth a look:  http://mashable.com/2010/01/27/9-upcoming-tablet-alternatives-to-the-apple-ipad/ ...
 
There are so many choices now, as per devices, the old fashioned PDF is looking better and better, because it handles color images and text so brilliantly. The Epub format is actually scrambling to catch up, and for many years to come, the PDF will remain out there at the front of the market because its flexibility -- the recent firmware upgrades have made all the difference. If/when the old PDF is finally killed off by its competition, you simply use a conversion utility: your old ebook goes in as PDF and comes back out as Epub, or whatever format won the war, by 2020. 
 
For myself, I have a BeBook, and the only downside to the device is that its display is monochrome. Otherwise, it's the perfect reader for most file formats short of the proprietary ones  -- and old, old PDFs which were made five years ago or longer, display on it without a hiccup.

Next year, I'm looking at getting one of the tablets with the color screen. One or two of them run Windows 7, so they behave absolutely like tablet computers which are the size, thickness and weight of books, as well as the content being searchable, with the potential to embed animation, sound etc. Talk about convenient! I'm just waiting for the price to come down. I paid $400 for my BeBook about 15 months ago. I would hope to pay something similar for one of the new tablets.

As a post-script to this, I want to give you a link over to a post of Jade's. She was looking at the future of ebook publishing, in a world where "fewer people are reading less of the time," and where the attention span of some readers is getting so short, they can't even make it through a movie. Publishers are (fact!) looking at ways to combine text, images, animations, sound and special effects into some new kind of project. A kind of hybrid that's going to need something like the iPad (or some of its competitors). Jade is one of the head honchos at DreamCraft, my own publisher. They're actually a multimedia studio which publishes books on the side; I signed with them back in the days when they were looking for "CD-Rom content provision." Well, CDR went the way of the dodo, because people want instant gratification, but ten years ago DreamCraft were already looking at the hybrid text/art/animation project. They time wasn't yet right; the technology had to catch up. Full circle, folks: the time is upon us ... and read this blogpost, if, as an indie, this interests you strangely: The Shape of Fiction Publishing to Come.

Food for thought? If you're looking at treating yourself to an ebook reader device, you could do worse than look at these: