Category: Techwriter
Unlike other readers who boast of reading a hundred ebooks a month, I like to take my time reading. Reading is both an educational and entertaining activity and reading ebooks should be hassle-free. Navigating, viewing, reading, and even annotating an ebook should be easy and straightforward. Thankfully, two file formats have emerged to be become the ebook file format standard: the venerable PDF and the spunky but plain EPUB.
There are great articles online about how to produce an EPUB file and it's easy to get into the arguments regarding the nuances of publishing an EPUB file. EPUBs are certainly getting easier to produce and are becoming more dynamic and interactive, but it's only getting started. PDF's maturity, stability, and usability, on the other hand, is undeniable. No effort is practically needed to produce a PDF with today's software.
For commercial ebooks, we're more concerned about the book itself than the file format. If it's available from iTunes, then send me that EPUB now so I can get started. But what about freely downloadable ebooks? Two of my favorite legitimate ebook sources, for instance, Gutenberg.org and Archive.org, provide options to download either PDF or EPUBs. So which do you choose?
Leisure Reading
Forget about XHTML, XSLT, and FO processors for one moment - which is the better format for readers? The easy answer is that once you get the EPUB or PDF on to your device and it renders properly as the author had intended, there really is no difference between the two.
EPUB is designed for reading. Unlike the mostly static PDF file, text in EPUBs reflows when resized. It's easy to believe that EPUB loses the fancy formatting and layouts PDF executes with ease (this is not entirely true - it just takes more effort to create the stylesheets). But a properly coded EPUB should look as good as any paperback. Although EPUB can accommodate images, EPUB's strength lies in displaying text.
I find EPUB perfect for smaller screens like my smartphone, iPod Touch, and 7" Sony Reader PRS-600. A book with 300 pages is actually smaller in EPUB than it is in PDF, though file size is actually negligible considering the processors and storage in tablets and readers these days. Besides text reflow and resize, what I really, really like about EPUB is that it renders faster than PDF. My old Sony Reader stutters and chokes on PDFs downloaded from Archive.org, but opens EPUBs like they were .txt files (which is actually true).
Work, Study, and Entertainment
There's a reason why whitepapers, technical documents, and research papers are published in PDF - support for annotation and structure. Although there are options and apps to annotate EPUBs, PDF was designed for this very purpose. Of course, you're only left with bookmarks if you're working with a commercial PDF magazine like Esquire or FHM or a scanned image converted to PDF, but freely accessible PDFs, say from Adobe's documentation, IBM's Redbooks, or marketing material from 95% of the company web sites out there, allow notes, highlights, and comments. For serious historical or technical studies, I definitely prefer PDFs.
I've already mentioned that PDF is horrible for underpowered tablets and older readers. Pages take a few seconds to display (if they display at all) and can even crash an app or two. Poorly produced PDFs can tax even a Linux-powered netbook. There are also occasions when I've encountered PDFs that are just not meant for ereaders and tablets that are smaller than 9". Scrolling around web pages is fine, but moving around and resizing each page of a PDF is a headache. Besides, PDFs just look much better on huge screens.
PDF is flexible and retains so much fidelity that colored magazines, picture books (like encyclopaedia), art books, and technical illustrations (for computer books) are rendered perfectly. I've stopped viewing PDFs on a small screen. They just function and work better on a 10" tablet like a Galaxy Tab or ASUS Transformer. Unlike EPUBs, however, PDFs are best viewed on a machine that has at least a dual core processor.
Love letter to EPUB and PDF
I remember Stephen King being interviewed about digital books more than a decade ago and he said that they would have to pry his cold, dead fingers from paperbacks before he would switch from paper. How times have changed. For me, it has been a long, long wait for a reading device such as tablets. I could never sit still long enough in front of a desktop or laptop to read 300-plus pages of PDF. Monitors are great for browsing the Internet, coding, and working - but reading? It took me a few years to finally own a tablet, but now that I do, I realize that it wouldn't be half as useful without PDFs and EPUBs.
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