5 ms·

I can't help but feel that you're in a minority there.

munificent 9y ago
My book [1] is available in print, Kindle, EPUB, and PDF versions. I sell many more EPUB versions than PDF, and way more Kindle (which is basically EPUB) versions. Most of that likely has to do with visibility — Kindle and Amazon are highly-used storefronts and platforms. But part of it is also I think fewer people actually do want a PDF version. PDF does look much better than EPUB — it has the fonts and layout that I carefully crafted for the print edition. But it's less flexible and responsible to the device you're viewing it on. That quickly takes its toll. A beautiful page layout that you have to keep pinch-zooming and scrolling around on to see everything isn't really "beautiful" when you consider the whole user experience. [1]: http://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/ http://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/
- reificator 9y ago
  Especially when pinch zooming on an eink screen with approx. 1fps...
- reificator 9y ago
  Oh also, I skimmed over the link last time I replied. I love your book, found individual sections while researching years and years ago and as soon as I saw there was a book available I grabbed it. Thanks for both providing that resource and for making it available in whichever I bought, Kindle or EPUB. The website is also very pleasant to read, and I like the way you handled asides across breakpoints.
  - munificent 9y ago
    Thank you! I put a lot of effort into the design of the site, print, and EPUB editions try to make each as readable as possible within their own unique constraints.
- pizza234 9y ago
  My judgment is skewed by having a Surface Book, which is 13.5" (3:2), which makes reading PDFs very comfortable in almost all the cases (exception being only the badly edited PDFs with extremely small fonts). I am very surprised though, that there are essentially no large tablets on the market, as I think 12.* is the minimum for comfortable reading, and I assume there is plenty of people using tablets for reading. I understand that cramming a Windows-capable machine in 13.5 inches and 700gr is reserved to high end machines, but I wonder why they don't do that with ARM CPUs (I'm aware of the Chuwi, but it's 1.1 kg, and 700 is barely the limit for reading for hours).
- Tepix 9y ago
  It depends on the device. On a typical 6inch eink ebook reader, a PDF is pretty much unusable, unreadable or both.

My book [1] is available in print, Kindle, EPUB, and PDF versions. I sell many more EPUB versions than PDF, and way more Kindle (which is basically EPUB) versions. Most of that likely has to do with visibility — Kindle and Amazon are highly-used storefronts and platforms. But part of it is also I think fewer people actually do want a PDF version. PDF does look much better than EPUB — it has the fonts and layout that I carefully crafted for the print edition. But it's less flexible and responsible to the device you're viewing it on. That quickly takes its toll. A beautiful page layout that you have to keep pinch-zooming and scrolling around on to see everything isn't really "beautiful" when you consider the whole user experience. [1]: http://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/ http://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/

reificator 9y ago
Especially when pinch zooming on an eink screen with approx. 1fps...
reificator 9y ago
Oh also, I skimmed over the link last time I replied. I love your book, found individual sections while researching years and years ago and as soon as I saw there was a book available I grabbed it. Thanks for both providing that resource and for making it available in whichever I bought, Kindle or EPUB. The website is also very pleasant to read, and I like the way you handled asides across breakpoints.
- munificent 9y ago
  Thank you! I put a lot of effort into the design of the site, print, and EPUB editions try to make each as readable as possible within their own unique constraints.
pizza234 9y ago
My judgment is skewed by having a Surface Book, which is 13.5" (3:2), which makes reading PDFs very comfortable in almost all the cases (exception being only the badly edited PDFs with extremely small fonts). I am very surprised though, that there are essentially no large tablets on the market, as I think 12.* is the minimum for comfortable reading, and I assume there is plenty of people using tablets for reading. I understand that cramming a Windows-capable machine in 13.5 inches and 700gr is reserved to high end machines, but I wonder why they don't do that with ARM CPUs (I'm aware of the Chuwi, but it's 1.1 kg, and 700 is barely the limit for reading for hours).
Tepix 9y ago
It depends on the device. On a typical 6inch eink ebook reader, a PDF is pretty much unusable, unreadable or both.