S60 Open to new features

Just like hardware and software for ebooks, there are tradeoffs in the formatting of the ebook itself. Here’s a completely inadequate list; what can you add to it?

• Plain Text — can be paired pretty well with browser-based display. Depends a great deal on the reader software’s ability to wrap lines of plain text in a useful way. Project Gutenberg has thousands of free books available in plain text.
• Tagged Text — the canonical example is html, but there are other tagging languages. Can work really well, but depends on the quality and consistency of the tagging. Depends on the type of text you want to read, too. If the book has tables, for example, plain text usually isn’t sufficient and you need some tagging to add structure.
• Acrobat (PDF) — this works reasonably well on desktop displays because it usually attempts to mimic printed text as closely as possible. Although handheld devices can deal with PDF files, the problem is that PDF’s underlying model is “the page” — in other words, the white space around the text is assumed to be just as important as the text itself. Not what you want on a handheld display. However, if you need to see graphically displayed information, and your PDF reader has good zooming capabilities, PDF can work pretty well. It also occurs to me that you could create a PDF file specifically to be read on a mobile device — I’ve never seen one, but it won’t be hard to create one to try. I’ll give it a try and post the results this coming week.

I just tried opening a PDF book (from TOR) on the iPhone. It opens in the browser but without any pdf-specific tools so (AFAIK) you can scroll but can’t go to a specific page. The pages are horizontally wrapped to the screen, so in landscape mode reading is fine — but this book has maps, and they’ve disabled zooming (which you can do in CSS, or maybe that’s just the way PDFs work on the iPhone). It’s not great. I’ll try the same book on in an S60 viewer; I expect it will be better in a true PDF application.