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Message: <blockquote data-quote="kenmarable" data-source="post: 4637223" data-attributes="member: 40359">PDFs are book wannabe's and I'm surprised we haven't moved past them years ago. Back in 2004, I think, I even remember a discussion on EN World here where I had an epiphany when Clark Peterson was talking about PDF ebooks and said it was like making a movie from a novel by filming someone sitting in a room reading the book out loud. It simply doesn't embrace the diferet medium at all.I planned out something that I thought would embrace the electronic medium, but got busy with real life (3 kids and being laid off can do that) and I was sure someone would have beat me to it anyway considering all of the limitations of PDF. There's been some leaning that way, but I'm surprised that years later that still no one has tried to move past PDFs. (Guess I better get busy on that idea, huh?)I can understand why PDFs are popular. Like others have mentioned, PDF readers are everywhere. Plus publishers are familiar with it and have plenty of options for creating them. But really, unless you are printing PDFs are subpar. You'd think with the sheer concentration of geeks in this hobby, someone would have made something better by now. Even WotC's version of Dragon and Dungeon are just the print magazine except rather than sent to a printer and distributor they are posted online. It's such a 20th century outdated publishing mindset throughout the industry even though we are almost a decade into the new century.All of these book wannabe's are painful at times for me, especially when the publisher doesn't even try to use the tools available in PDFs themselves (no bookmarks, no hyperlinks - yes you can have the benefit of a hyperlinked html archive and pdf layout). 0one is only publisher I have seen to actually push the PDF envelope and embrace that technology. So many just click "print to PDF" and call it done. It's just publishing a book without paying the printing cost and certainly not "e-publishing" in any meaningful sense of the word. For some of the short $2 PDFs, sure there's only so much content to move to the new medium anyway. But there are ways of doing it better... much, much better, especially for longer products.</blockquote>

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