/lit/ - Literature

>>20278820
I am fully convinced that e-reader technology is currently not developed enough for e-books to supersede physical books. There are multiple reasons but the main ones are
>In order to have a comfortable reading experience comparable with that of a physical book, you need a screen that is at least 9.7 inches or larger; there are currently only a few e-readers on the market with screens this large and almost all of them are $300 or more (and the ones that are under $300 have significant drawbacks, like low resolutions/PPI, no backlight, etc)
>Competing / inconsistent ebook formats: the two most common brands (Kobo and Kindle) each have their own preferred format (Kepub and AZW, respectively), but the most common, accepted format is Epub. Also, there are no standards for how ebooks should be formatted: even from professional publishers who are making ebook versions of their books (Penguin, Library of America, Modern Library, etc), the formatting is all over the place and there is no consistency in how the ebook is split into sections/chapters, the use of the .epub tag types, the use of embedded fonts, pre-set line spacing and typeface size, etc.
There are only two solutions to this that have popped up so far: the first one is Standard Ebooks; they have a very strict manual of style and formatting guide to make sure that all of their ebooks are consistent and well-formatted without any of the weird issues you get from ebooks produced by official publishers; the only drawback is that they currently only produce ebooks of works that are in the public domain. The second solution is to use exclusively PDFs of scanned books:, since they retain the professional typesetting and formatting of the physical book; the drawback is that you need a very large screen to properly read them, and you lose several features (reflowable text, interchangable typefaces, searchable/high-lightable text, etc). Also, getting good scans of PDFs and turning them into something that can be easily read on an e-reader is difficult, and PDFs have much larger filesizes than other ebook formats, especially when you add OCR; digital storage space is getting cheaper, however, so this last point is not as important.
>This is a more minor point but: digital typesetting on e-readers is currently nowhere near developed enough to rival traditional print typesetting; the quality of digital fonts is wildly inconsistent and the typesetting engines used to render text in epubs and other ebook formats is severely underdeveloped (lack of proper kerning, for example).