A while ago a friend pointed me at an ebook reader article. My response is at http://fylz.com-ebook-readers complete with an expired link. (I didn't know Yahoo links were useless until now.) Well, today, I got pushed into a bit more research.

I now see the error of my ways. I was thinking about electronic books which I was equating to a computer file that gave you something like you would get on paper. Apparently my 20+ years in the publishing business got me thinking like that. Some would say this error was because I am getting old but I think it was caused by experience. The years of dealing with, for example, Postscript files and having to make sure you had the right fonts on your system and in your printer.

This years-long battle was finally solved when the world pretty much accepted PDFs as the way to go. For those who don't know what I am talking about here, a PDF is more or less a fancy PostScript file with the fonts included. Bingo! PDFs always display right because they are self-contained. And, finally, electronic book publishing worked.

While that was a final solution for a professional—that is, someone who produced magazines, technical books and such where layout was oh so important—it just caused me to not see the other kind of publishing. That is, the kind where you really don't care all that much about the layout or even the fonts. For us geezers, that was what we had with text editors before we went through this upgrade to fancy document production systems. For older or less technically inclined people, that was what you typewriter did.

Now, I confess that text editors and typewriters didn't handle insertion of graphics very well. You pretty much had to just leave some space and paste the graphic in (I mean with paste, not Ctrl+V) before making the copies. Of course, as copies did mean something on paper, that wasn't that big a deal.

With all that background, we get to my personal definition of an epub. This is something where you toss out your ability to control layout and even fonts very well but you don't have to use paste to put in the graphics. It sounds like a step backwards but, with uncreative viewer devices, there apparently is a need.

Let me address one aside here. When the World Wide Web came to be, the idea was that you could toss out some graphics and some text with minimalist formatting information and this magic device called a Web Browser would come up with a decent way to display the information. In other words, it gave you text even better than your text editor because you had bold, italic, typewriter-like, bigger, smaller and a few more things plus you could toss in the graphics without the paste jar.

What followed, however, was that many WWW users, particularly companies who wanted to convey a particular image), first pushed browser manufacturers to add non-standard features so their pages could be formatted more precisely and, eventually got many new formatting features added to HTML, the language of the web, to address presentation issues.

OK, back to epubs. It seems like we are in a loop again. Epub readers come in an assortment of sizes meaning both physical sizes and display resolution sizes. Thus, a PDF formatted for what might be like a 6 x 9 inch book page will be too wide for some epub readers and too narrow for others. Assuming the publication could have its text re-flowed without creating a disaster (easy for a novel, very hard for most technical publications), a not as good as PDF format could be used. As long as it didn't screw up the graphics and graphic placement, you would have, well, what HTML used to be.

So, I get it. That is, I understand that a PDF is too good to be used here. But, why not HTML and that magic thing called a Web Browser? This is precisely what they initially did and with good graphics handling capabilities, they can handle your epub just fine. Long ago, web publishers discovered that if you want something with text in it to look a certain way, you just convert it to a graphic. Thus, we have people that understand the process, display programs and a huge assortment of existing readers for this format.

Oh, I think I get it now. If epubs and web pages were the same, how could you get people to buy another gadget—an epub reader? Why didn't I think of that 10 paragraphs ago?

For me, I will read my ebooks (the things where format matters) with a PDF viewer such as okular and I will read my epubs (electronic information where format is less critical) with Firefox or Opera. No changes or new gadgets needed here.