I’ve written before about the deplorable production values in ebooks: misspellings, poor typography, missing words, terrible spacing, and a general lack of cohesiveness in the finished product. The problem is particularly acute with technical books as Tim Evans-Ariyeh points out in his excellent post What was the matter with PDF? Technical books look, he says, “as if you gave a troubled child a pair of scissors and a complex book and said ‘Hey kid, somehow make this fit a smaller screen.’”
He goes on to say that, yes, there are challenges in producing a single file for many devices of varying sizes but that we’ve had a technology that solves those problems since 1993: PDF. The real problem appears to be with flowing text. Ebook readers don’t really have—or at least don’t emphasize—the notion of pages. They like to flow the text so that it fills the screen at whatever font size the reader has chosen. That works pretty well for novels but is terrible for technical books where the page structure is very often important. I typeset my two technical books myself with Groff and I can tell you that a lot of effort goes into getting that page structure right.
John Wait, the legendary editor/publisher from Pearson Education, popped up in the comments to say that at InformIT they offer epub, MOBI, and PDF formats for their books and that PDF is the most requested format by far. Proprietary ebook readers, of course, want to lock you into whatever DRMed format they’re using and have little interest in providing PDFs. It’s companies like Pearson and O’Reilly that don’t have DRM that are giving technical readers the best experience by providing PDF versions of their books.
If you care about these sort of issues, the comments at the end of Evans-Ariyeh’s post are interesting. They explore some of the problems with PDFs and ebooks in general and are worth a look.