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<div class="gmail_quote">On Thu, Jul 10, 2008 at 5:04 PM, Diane Serley <<a href="mailto:olpc.aunti.mame@gmail.com">olpc.aunti.mame@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="PADDING-LEFT: 1ex; MARGIN: 0px 0px 0px 0.8ex; BORDER-LEFT: #ccc 1px solid">This works well for a tech document or a picturebook, but not so well for a novel. If its HTML there is no pagination... you can only break by chapters. But there are no other markers that let you, for example, stop at page 127 and pick it up again there tomorrow. Instead, you have to stop in Chapter 8 and then tomorrow search through Chapter 8 to get to the place you stopped at -- do-able, but vaguely inconvenient. <br>
<br>Here's an example: I just formatted the novel Jane Eyre. Formatting for the XO the book ends up being 443 pages long or 38 chapters. I personally wouldn't want to read that as 38 HTML pages. They would be waaaay to long and finding where I might have stopped previously would be a pain. And I especially wouldn't want to have 443 HTML pages! <br>
<br>I guess I'm hung up on the "book" portion of "e-book" and expecting e-books to behave like books with pagination. Am I just being old-fashioned? <br><br></blockquote>
<div>Not to put too fine a point on it, but you are formatting Jane Eyre, so maybe a just little old-fashioned :-)</div>
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<div>I am a big fan of HTML for a variety of reasons (in particular for the type of content I want to develop), but in the end of the day, format choice must be heavily influenced by intended use. In the case of a novel, I think PDF is a very strong contender and at the moment, the obvious choice (until some other sort of e-book software with fancier features comes along in Sugar).</div>
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<div>For shorter works that are intended more for reference use (random access) than front-to-back reading (serial access), the advantages oif HTML may begin to tip the scales, particularly if you put in the time to do good indexing and hyperlinking. Most novels are not really very hypertextual in nature, particularly those from the 19th century. Slightly off-topic, there was a time when serialization of novels was all the rage and I have to wonder if such a work might be the exception where HTML actually conveys the author's intent (and original reader's experience) even more accurately than current bound versions. </div>
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<div>cjl</div>
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