Which eBook Format Should I Toss All My Eggs In?

April 2, 2008 5:12 PM

I don't have an ebook reader. If you do, can you tell me your preferred format for receiving cool stuff?

I want to make my publications available to those on the go, downloadable via my website. I am not interested in employing any kind of copy-protection technology. I just want to choose a format that will work for the most common ebook readers, with the least amount of hassle for me or for the end-user. Plain text is too plain because I enjoy italics, so I need to move up one step. The content currently exists in UTF-8 XHTML, and has no image or multimedia requirements. Any advice would be much appreciated.

posted by CheeseburgerBrown to computers & internet (25 comments total)

Plain old HTML is my personal favorite, because it is so easy to convert into other formats and because every reader out there will be able to handle it.
posted by Eddie Mars at 5:20 PM on April 2, 2008

PDF. Easy and free (both to create and manipulate) and has good readers (e.g. Skim). It also translates well between systems, i.e. it maintains formatting no matter what computer you use it on; I had problems regarding fonts and such with other formats.
posted by WalterMitty at 5:29 PM on April 2, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

Ditto flat vanilla HTML, unless you've got some reason to believe your target market is technophobic. If for no other reason than everybody already knows how to handle/convert it.

IMO, the only other format even worth considering is PDF, and I'd put it at a distant second, unless you need more extensive format control.
posted by Orb2069 at 5:32 PM on April 2, 2008

For pleasure, I read almost exclusively on my laptop, in bed. My first choice is always plain text, with HTML (so long as it's not loaded with the insane crap that is added to it during a 'Save As HTML' from Microsoft Word; I mean nice, clean minimal, unframed HTML) is my second choice. RTF is fine, even LIT, because MS's ebook reader app is reasonable from a useability point of view (but they provide no tools for extracting plaintext from it, so that sucks), but my absolute last choice is PDF. I loathe PDF, in part because Adobe's offerings in the ebook reader application space, on PC at least, are so utterly unusable.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 5:46 PM on April 2, 2008

PDF. Easy and free (both to create and manipulate) and has good readers (e.g. Skim). It also translates well between systems, i.e. it maintains formatting no matter what computer you use it on; I had problems regarding fonts and such with other formats.

This is just wrong. All current eBook readers suck at reading PDFs. You should ask this question at the mobileread.com forums, where everyone has a reader.

I have a Sony PRS-500, and PDF is not the format you want to use.
posted by fake at 6:19 PM on April 2, 2008

Pdfs dont work so well on iphones either.
posted by destro at 6:24 PM on April 2, 2008

pdfs are good for reading on laptops.

For windows the sumatra pdf viewer is lightweight and open source.

pdfs and html would be the way to go.

Or CHM...... If you decide you hate everyone.
posted by sien at 6:44 PM on April 2, 2008

Ditto HTML.

PDF is next to impossible on my device, which is a Sony Clie PDA running Plucker for reading.
posted by anadem at 6:46 PM on April 2, 2008

Say no to pdfs! I have yet to find anything portable that can read them conveniently. My sony reader "supports" the file type, but the actual reading experience is awful.
posted by Macduff at 6:53 PM on April 2, 2008

Oh dear, PDFs seem quite unpopular. I must admit I only have experience with fully-fledged computers running Mac OS X or Windows and none of the current "eBook readers" or PDAs, which is why I recommended PDFs since - on Mac/ Windows systems, at least - I've had a uniformly good experience with them. Apologies.
posted by WalterMitty at 6:59 PM on April 2, 2008

Please not PDF. PDF is hard to read on any of the devices I use, palm or nokia 770.

Please do HTML.
posted by adamwolf at 7:01 PM on April 2, 2008

PDFs are a bit too complex for most book readers out there. I use plain text files on my psp and my phone. Simple is best, because whatever hardware/software you have can more easily change font/size, etc.
posted by zardoz at 7:19 PM on April 2, 2008

Nthing: PDFs are great on a full-fledged computer, awful on anything portable.
So many types of portable, ebook formats, etc. that the universal is plain HTML/text.
PDFs can be made a lot prettier, but you've got to go for the lowest common denominator if you want the biggest audience, so plain HTML is the way to go. (I am able to access MeFi on just about everything, which makes me love and use it more than if it was full of shiny web doodads that rendered it useless on something not manufactured last week.)
posted by bartleby at 8:43 PM on April 2, 2008

HTML or even just raw text. Rich text has reasonable support.

Remember those hacker, cracker, phreaker, anarchist cookbooks circulating around on (mostly PC-based) BBSs (some of which could still be found today) that were from the Apple ][e era that looked like it was ALL CAPS?

html is probably pretty stable and will be backwards compatible for a really long time, so it also has that going for it. Unless English becomes a minority language, I can't see ASCII going away. The more basic the markup, the more available converters will be.
posted by porpoise at 8:52 PM on April 2, 2008

Semantic HTML!
posted by cowbellemoo at 8:54 PM on April 2, 2008

ASCII, unless you really, really need the formatting, in which case HTML 2.0 is acceptable.

If you need more formatting than that, you're doing it wrong.
posted by Kadin2048 at 9:37 PM on April 2, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

Reiterating what Kadin2048 said.

For windows the sumatra pdf viewer is lightweight and open source.

The issue (my issue) is not pdf viewing per se, for which there are a myriad of choices. The issue, for me, is a half-decent ebook app, which has very specific useability and design requirements. No application that I am aware of for reading pdf-formatted ebooks, on the PC platform, measures up.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 9:41 PM on April 2, 2008

Thansk for all the answers, everyone. The uniformity of response is helpful, too, because it provides uncontested clarity.

From what I've read PDFs can be a bother because they won't rewrap the text for a different display size, forcing the reader to scroll (annoying -- scrolls are so-o-o-o two millennia ago). Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but selections cannot be copied out of a PDF, can they? I mean, you can't highlight a passage and copy-paste it into another doc, right? Meh.

I think I'm going to focus on streamlining my HTML and taking out any decorative elements, so eBookists can download something slim, clean and universal.

Thanks again!
posted by CheeseburgerBrown at 4:30 AM on April 3, 2008

Why not offer it in multiple formats? Tor recently released a bunch of SF novels in multiple formats, and I now have HTML, MobiReader and PDF copies of each of them, which are good for different platforms (variously reading on my MacBook and my N95).
posted by Happy Dave at 7:26 AM on April 3, 2008

CheeseburgerBrown, you can select text out of a PDF, if its done correctly, but even so, the scrolling is a pain, and most lower powered devices lag real badly on PDFs.
posted by adamwolf at 8:07 AM on April 3, 2008

This whole discussion has put me onto a lot of reading, and now I not only recognize how I should format my texts for maximum eBook love, but I've also come to be educated on the subject of just how horribly borked my website itself is in terms of code.

(I never claimed to be a Web Designer.)

At any rate, now I'm rejiggering my site to totally separate content from styling, and this move will give me the flexibility I need to offer my stories in a variety of formats. My first step is to clean up my code on my content as it stands, and that's what I'm doing now.

My goal here is to be among the first generation of writers to successfully quit the traditional publishing racket in favour of the new electronic, shareable reality. Traditionally publishing isn't paying enough to cover my bills anyway, so I figure what the hell? Why not give it all away and see what happens?

When my library of free eBook content is ready and available I'll post it to MetaFilter Projects, so those interested in finding something to read.

Thanks again, everybody.
posted by CheeseburgerBrown at 5:04 PM on April 3, 2008

Your HTML won’t be portable unless it’s valid, semantic HTML with a declared character encoding that matches the encoding of the file. Odds are you are missing one or more of those requirements, but they are easily fixed.

PDF viewers on E-book readers and handheld devices may be shitty, but that issue is separate from PDF itself. Tagged PDF is reflowable. Even untagged PDFs are reflowable in Acrobat some of the time. Bookmarks are a must.

People will believe pretty much anything critical about PDFs even if untrue. We could spend all day correcting errors. Let’s not: Just use a reasonable authoring platform (even MS Word on Windows can output tagged PDFs) and you’re done.

Valid HTML and tagged PDF are an ideal combination. Any other kind of HTML, any other kind of PDF, or any other format is not.
posted by joeclark at 7:22 PM on April 3, 2008

Any other kind of HTML, any other kind of PDF, or any other format is not.

*shrugs* Agreed on the first two, but ss I said, I read books in electronic format (almost) exclusively (and have for almost a decade, at the rate of 50 or 60 a year). My preferred format remains plain text, for books that do not have illustrations.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 9:47 PM on April 3, 2008

stavros - what features do you want in an ebook reader? Bookmarking? Annotations? (sorry about the hijacking)
posted by sien at 1:41 AM on April 6, 2008

Didn't see that question until now, sorry.

In terms of PC applications, the basic feature set is pretty simple. Off the top of my head, in addition to the standard features one expects in terms of customizability:

a) text reflow. You need to able to set your desired font size, and have pages reflow. The pdf concept of pages that are set in stone just does not translate to e-books. You need to be able to view one page to a screen, or two, at any font size you set. Even Adobe Labs' new ebook reader insists on showing you pages that you either need to scroll to read (ridiculous) or zoom so far out that the fonts are unreadably small if you want to see a full 'page'. Don't give me any shit about 'what the typesetter intended' or such like stuff, either, Adobe. This is not paper!

b) Configurable page turn buttons, or, at a minimum, the spacebar, the pageup and pagedown keys, and the arrow keys.

c) Aspect switching between landscape and portrait. Tablets and small devices need this less than standard laptops, but it is nonetheless important.

Things like bookmarking and annotations are pretty standard these days in most ebook apps, as are the normal things like remembering which book I was reading on startup and what my last page was, and going to that on launch, library browsing, and so on.

One thing I'd love to see, which I haven't found yet for any app, is a library feature that will parse out the filenames semi-intelligently, and go out to the net to find info/covers/etc for that book, as metadata in the library. I'd also like to be able to point the library app at a folder tree and have it intelligently import the appropriate filetypes found there.

But at heart, a good ebook reader app should be fullscreen by default, intuitive to use, and get the hell out of my way, so that I can forget about everything but hitting a button for a page turn.

It's a hideous-looking application, and a nightmare from a useability for anything but actually just reading (and a hideous website), but I use and think µBook is best for text, rtf, and html books, and (naturally) Microsoft's Reader app for their proprietary lit files. I convert pdfs to txt if I want to read them.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 12:17 AM on April 11, 2008