PDF Still Winning Ebook Formatting War
Wonder what format you should be using to offer your ebooks? It’s funny – I hear all of this chatter constantly on publishing discussion forums and blogs about different ebook formats like Epub, LRF or RTF when Adobe PDF has always been the leader for distributing and reading ebooks online.
Why?
1. Universal access across many different operating systems
2. Adobe reader maintains compatibility – even though Adobe frequently updates their readers, they do a very good job of getting their customers to update and even when they don’t, files typically work many releases back.
3. Formatting – if you have ever packaged an ebook you have written using MS Word or Open Office, you will notice how quick and easy it is to turn your fully formatted document into a beautiful looking PDF
The graphic showing the lead PDF’s still have in terms of ebook format comes from a recent survey done by Smashwords.
Of specific note is how popular Mobi format which allows for reading of ebooks on smart mobile devices – this is certainly something to watch in coming months and depending on your ebook market, maybe a format you want to support.
All of this means that converting your ebooks into the most popular format for ebooks is easy, consistently effective and operates with very little post customer support – something to consider when you have tens of thousands of ebooks on various customer’s computers.
