Re: Scott Sigler's Infected

Mike Schilling wrote:

> And to postscript, which seems ideal for the purpose of displaying 
> non-interactive stuff on a screen: highly expressive, reasonably 
> compact, extremely well-documented, lots of prgramming expertise 
> available.   No douct there are excellent reasons that all of the 
> e-readers invented their own proprietary format instead. 

Um, I hate to tell you this, but both pdf and ps are space-hogs that 
take up twice as much space as the competition. Both formats were 
intended for publishing to paper across a wide variety of printers, not 
for human reading on a screen. They're terrible at displaying on varying 
screen sizes, and both are dominated by a single company (Adobe) that 
has trouble playing well with others. They're also slow to render.

Most other e-book formats have a common underlying format structure 
governed by an industry standard group. It's a variant of sgml, html, 
xml, etc. It produces a fairly compact file that reads well across 
platforms. There are a couple of rogues, but Kindle, Mobipocket, MS Lit, 
and (I think) Sony, all use the same structure, and just put their own 
compression and DRM wrapper over it. Kindle and Mobi actually just use 
different encryption keys for the two versions of the same file.

Of course, IMO, the best choice is an rtf file kept in an unencrypted 
zip archive. Microbook can read those directly. That combination 
produces the smallest file size with very good expressiveness and 
excellent portability. It's also a no-brainer for standardization.

I read a lot of e-books, so I researched this once. :) PDA's back then 
only had a modest amount of memory.

Regards,
Jack Tingle