Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="kenmarable" data-source="post: 4638684" data-attributes="member: 40359">Maybe I'm just crazy here, but why do we want to keep making book wannabe's and call it "electronic publishing"?Ok, for anything you want to print out, PDF is the way to go. Period. It's the most widely used and one of the best formats out there (could debate for a long time on whether it is THE best, but I certainly think there's little argument against it being among the top contenders).But still, why do electronic products still have to mimic books and book layout? "Book" technology is thousands of years old, and with this new electronic medium, can't we do better? Like the analogy I heard from Clark Peterson, when you turn a novel into a movie, why would you just film someone sitting in a room reading the book out loud? PDFs can have built in search, cut-n-paste, bookmarks, hyperlinks (and publishers are lazy if they don't add at least bookmarks if not hyperlinks as well) - but you're just filming someone reading that book out loud in a really nice room with cool music. It's still not even coming close to using the medium to its fullest extent.Now, of course people will want hard copies, so even if someone does actually explore the electronic medium fully, I imagine they will either include a bundled PDF or have the ability to generate one on the fly for printing purposes.But there is so much more you can do with electronic RPG "books" that a physical book and PDF book wannabe could ever do. Still treating a physical book layout as a primary concern is incredibly limiting. PDF vs. HTML vs. RTF vs. whatever is still someone sitting in a castle reading Harry Potter into a camera, or a trilogy of Peter Jackson in a Ren Faire costume lounging around a New Zealand countryside. We can do so much better!</blockquote>

Verification