Regarding the arguments against text reflowing from page to page? Can we really take this seriously? One of the greatest advantages of the e-book is the ability to resize and reflow the text.

Personally, I am not a big fan of netbooks for reading novels; the form factor is not designed for an immersive experience; in fact the omnipresence of the keyboard ensures that you are always aware of the fact that it is a computer and that there are other things you “could” be doing with it. As others have pointed out, back-lit screens also cause additional eyestrain and also wasteful if you are going to be reading in a lighted room.

Now I am not saying that dedicated readers will always be the best form factor for ebooks. Give them a few years for new screen technology to develop, and in a tablet, a netbook might be a grand way to read books. But it isn’t yet.

Let’s extrapolate beyond that; how will we enjoy an entire culture as transient as the evening news? All these devices are gadgets; the paper book as well as the hand-held electronic reader. But their uses for culture transmission vary. I am always amused when the death of print books is mentioned; I have a whole collection of truly dead e-book readers.

PDF is to be avoided at all costs – text must flow, and automatically adjust to fit the screen of whichever gadget I’m currently using. I’ve had a lot of trouble trying to get the few PDF ebooks I’ve bought onto a PDA. Even when I tried to extract just the text of the story, I found that there were a lot of hidden formatting in the PDF file. It ‘looked’ good when viewing the PDF on a computer, but the extracted text included the header/footer info from each page and sometimes had line breaks where there shouldn’t be that was very distracting when I tried to read the stories. (I only want a PDF file if I plan to print out a hard-copy, like for a tech manual. If it was a book with a lot of pictures, I would probably just buy the bound book.)

Why carry a device that serves only one purpose when, for about the same price, I can grab a netbook computer and go.
With a lightweight netbook, I can read, check email, surf the web, do office work, etc.
I like the e-reader idea until I compare it to what a netbook can deliver for about $299.

Well, I read with my phone, which is always on and has QReader running in the background so that switching to it where I left it takes only a fraction of a second. I can also check email and do light surfing on the phone.

If I think I’ll need to do “office work” (i.e., programming) I take my 12″ notebook with me, but I’ll still read only with the phone. When I’m waiting in line at the grocery store I’m not going to take out and start up my notebook, even if it was a relatively small 7″ model with a relatively short, 4-second “unsuspend from memory”-function and with my ebook-reader software already loaded. However, I will start reading on the phone after spending a second or two unlocking it and switching to QReader.

A nicely formatted e-book is still a badly formatted print book.

They are not analogous. They’re never going to be analogous. Trying to make them analogous is futile. It is simply a different animal altogether and if one approaches it that way, IMO, one has less difficulty adapting.

We’ve got teenagers and children who’ve been reading from computer screens since they were tiny, who know qwerty by the time they’re in first grade, and who are sublimely comfortable reading text in any medium they get it.

It occurs to me that the OP may have wrong or skewed information on which she is basing her opinions. But thinking an e-book should be just like a print book is dead-end thinking. At this point, I’m getting very impatient with my print books because it does not have an CTRL-F function, and, like Bryan above, I don’t travel and read my e-book at night in bed (backlit) snuggled under my covers and don’t disturb my husband.

Print books are dead to me.

They won’t be dead to me until all books are digitized, but yeah. I hear you and I’m getting there.

Publishers that I talk to moan about the inability of the current e-books to format to the usual specs of print books.

Publishers aren’t terribly happy with being forced to get on the bandwagon, so I’m suspicious of any arguments they make against e-books.

What “standard” is that? What “specs” are those?

He then goes on to ask “why do we have to abandon the precision of layout and design possible in print?”

What “precision of layout and design” do you require? The vast majority of e-books that people read are novels, and the vast majority of those hew to no more “precision of layout and design” than starting chapters on a new page and having text neatly separated into paragraphs. E-books do both of those just fine.

If you’re talking about something more than novels—reference books with lots of tables (such as role-playing game manuals), and a need for accurate tables of contents and indices—then you may have a point. But PDF is still not necessarily the answer.

Things that are viewed on big screens, or big surface areas (such as role-playing game books), have to be adapted to smaller screens. You can’t show a book the same way on a small screen, like an e-book reader or PDA, that you can on a larger one. People can’t read tables if they’re teeny tiny.

And PDF is not the answer. You can’t expect the incredible diversity of e-book readers out there to standardize on one screen size, because people use a whole range of devices that way.

Publishers are just going to have to figure out some way of having the mountain come to Mohammed—because bringing Mohammed to the mountain just won’t work.

PDF files have good uses, like short instruction manuals for products, or preparing the text layout for a printer, but it just does a very poor job for handheld eReaders. I think it would be like pounding a nail into a well with the butt end of a screwdriver. Not the right tool for the job. Content providers should understand just how poorly the PDF format performs when off desk or laptop computers.

I like my Kindle and find to a useful tool for reading ebooks. I don’t want a touch screen, color, email, or other light computing. I usually read 8 to 12 books per month and I want my device to show me nicely formated text on a screen; and—at least with a Kindle—an easy to buy and obtain the books I want to read today. Right now I have it and it works for me. The Kindle or other eReader may not be the right fit for everyone, but the idea of the PDF format as a solution needs to be abandoned. Quickly

I also like pdf for reading. Technical books mostly. For novels, reflowable/resizeable text is “the only way to go!”

And a nicely formatted p-book that has print too small to comfortably read is a failure as a book, period. As is a fat hardcover that weighs as much as a brick and doesn’t fit in a pocket. Given a choice between books as inflexible objets d’art or as objects that adapt to how I want to use them, I’ll choose the latter.

My PDA can accomodate any format, even PDF*. If reading technology or styles change, it’s a simple matter to load a different reader program. I’m not stuck with a device which only does one thing, but have a general purpose device which spreads its expense across a wide variety of functions, from reading to music playing to note-taking.

Regards,
Jack Tingle

*PDF, IMO is the worst acceptable format for an ebook. It’s really intended for publishing on paper, not reading text on an easily portable machine. If it’s tagged for reflow, it can serve the purpose.

I like the precision of a nicely formatted book

Surely you are aware of the fact that the layouts of those nicely formatted books are done on computers and that ebook-readers are computers.

At home, they prefer paper books.

I don’t. I hate p-books. IMHO e-books are so much nicer to handle.

A wi-fi netbook, the half-size notebooks

If it works for you fine, but it certainly doesn’t for me. I used to have a FlyBook about half the size of my current 12″ notebook, but still I found it too bulky for reading novels and the screen too small for scientific articles. And the battery didn’t last long enough and it took forever to boot since it was running a normal computer OS. And the screen was unusable outdoors. (It sure was pretty, though, in its ferrari-red glossy finish.)

Right now, it’s accepted that e-books will have text that “flows” from page to page; that assumption is based on the inability of the industry to adopt a standard.

I’m questioning whether that should be an assumption.

Huh? What “standard” are you babbling about? A one-size-fits-all screen size???

There will always be different screen sizes and there are lots of people with bad eyesight who wants the text to be bigger than what, e.g., a teenager with perfect eyesight wants it to be. And there are even different viewing conditions. E.g., what’s easily visible indoors might be less visible at the beach, or vice versa. And there are different viewing preferences. E.g., I like it when “pages” overlap by 1-2 lines, i.e. the 1-2 lines at the bottom of one page will be the 1-2 lines at the top of the next page.

So, since so many page sizes are wanted, and even needed, reflowability is among the biggest advantages ebooks have over their dead-tree relatives. Having a fixed page size for ebooks would thus be copiously moronic.