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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jeff Wilder" data-source="post: 4638369" data-attributes="member: 5122">Which is great ... except when your purpose isn't to print the document.  That's the problem with PDF ... the format was created for pagination and printing, and now it's used for everything.As for what else is available, the answer is "not much."  But that's not because PDF is suited for what it's being used for, it's because PDF is easier on publishers.  Some folks are saying, "There's no market for another format," and other people are saying, "There aren't any other formats."  Hopefully the reader can see the problem with accepting both of those statements as True, especially in the context of a question like, "Why is PDF the de facto format for ebooks?"Personally, for my Palm device, I use a program called iSilo.  It's not ideal -- it basically takes an HTML doc of however many pages, links it all into one doc, and compresses it -- but it works pretty well.  I have the entire SRD -- fully hyperlinked, with nice additions like all the Celestial and Fiendish varieties of summoned critters -- on my phone, and use it constantly.  (I similarly have annotated copies of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence, all of my law school outlines, a huge database of court decisions, and lots and lots of other stuff.)I'm not a developer, but I know that there are, or can be developed, markup languages that will create a great experience with reading an ebook -- complete with images and tables -- on a small screen (which does not necessarily mean just a PDA).  But as long as people keep making overly broad statements like, "PDF is clearly superior to everything, so why develop anything else," those formats -- extant or future -- will never gain any ground.How many of you folks own stock in Adobe, anyway?(I posted several years ago offering the iSilo SRD .pdb to folks, BTW.  Mark, of CMG, got it from me with the intent of updating the license info and making it available more widely, too, but I dunno how he's progressed on that.  Bear in mind that iSilo is a commercial program.  It's also nearing the end of a highly useful secondary purpose -- going out and grabbing HTML pages for later reading -- due to increasing prevalence of broadband speeds on PDAs and smartphones.  But it's still worth the cash, IMO.)</blockquote>

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