Wednesday, December 9, 2009

5 Top Publishers Plan Rival to Kindle Format, Ignore Existence of PDF

Five of the nation's largest publishers of newspapers and
magazines are teaming up to challenge Amazon.com Inc.'s Kindle electronic-book reader with their own
technology that would display in color and work on a variety of devices.
- Ryan
Nakashima, The
Washington Post
.

As I’m sure you all know by
now; I am a coder above all else.  With this one piece of data, you should know there are two
things I despise in this entire world:

  • Flash and

  • PDF

Why?  Because they’re closed off, proprietary, and
quite frankly a bitch to deal with on computers.  However, that doesn’t stop me from advocating
their use for WHAT THEIR ACTUAL PURPOSE is (or, in the case of flash – should be).

So, it
should come as only a slight surprise that I’m incredibly agitated over these new formats.  You’re
creating “book” file formats that will “display in color” and “work on a variety of devices.”  Huh,
isn’t there already a format specifically for publications, made to work on any multitude of devices? 
Let’s see, oh, right Portable
Document
Format
– A
file format made SPECIFICALLY to render the same way on any device.

Kudos, Publishers –
You’ve just re-invented the wheel.

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