On Sat, 2 Feb 2002 09:00:13 -0800, Mitchell Waite wrote:
> Question for this group. How do you feel about a book in a PDF format and
> how do you feel about buying eBooks vs paper based books. Check out
> http://www.ebooktech.com/ which provides a way to publish and buy books in
> PDF format. Here is an interesting argument about eBooks from another
> mailing list I am member of.

- I actually read e-books in the e-format, but mostly not technical manuals.
  The market for technical books is a little murkier, because of all of the
  equations and graphics and layout and font changes and so on, but pure
  prose works great on a Palm Pilot - I always have a novel or two with me
  at the dentist's office, sitting at the BMV waiting for them to call my  
  number, waiting for a movie to start, or whatever.  As an aside, the 
  ridiculous prices publishers charge for current, copyrighted works (you're
  charging me the same price the bookstore could sell me paper for?  And
  pocketing the distribution charges, channel markup, and printing costs?
  Yeah, right.  Pull the other one.) have gotten me reading the classics.

- PDF is nice, but it needs lots of things that some people producing PDF
  seem to forget:
  
  o There needs to be *at least* a table of contents in bookmark form.
  o Page thumbnails are virtually useless, but should be included anyway just 
    so it looks like you care.
  o The "real" table of contents, if the book is also provided in paper format
    with such a table of contents, should consist of hyperlinks.  This is
    especially important if you didn't go to the trouble to provide one in 
    the PDF file.
  o The index, if there is one, should also contain hyperlinks for the page
    numbers, see alsos, and so on.
  o If sample code is included, it should either be possible to select it
    and copy it directly from the PDF document, or there should be a hyperlink
    to a text file containing the sample code.  This should apply whenever
    the sample is more than 2-3 lines long, and possibly even more often.
  o The document should be text, not scanned pages.  This makes it usable 
    with accessibility aids (that's a plug for my employer) as well as making
    it more usable with things like the PDF reader for PalmOS.  It also means
    you can zoom in without losing detail (if you want an example of how not
    to do this, get a copy of the original Dr. Dobbs' Essential Books on 
    Graphics.)  Related to this, the document should be searchable.
  o If lots of images are supplied, a separate "images index" wouldn't be a
    bad idea.  Something like a contact sheet, with hyperlinks to the full-
    sized versions of the images in the document.
  
-- 
plane{-z,-3normal{crackle scale.2#local a=5;#while(a)warp{repeat x flip x}rotate
z*60#local a=a-1;#end translate-9*x}pigment{rgb 1}}light_source{-9red 1rotate 60
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