ID Fixed layout vs. pdf

The major ebook retailers won’t let you post a PDF for sale. They want an EPUB created with an set of open specifications. This is the main difference between FXL EPUB and PDF.

There is one very ‘major ebook retailer’ who, it appears, has no plans to support FXL ePub (Amazon). In the meantime, they do in fact sell PDF files (‘Print Replica’), and today announced launch of ‘KDP Kids’, which includes authoring tools that are dead simple to use, compared to InDesign. One of the main ‘use cases’ for FXL ePub is supposed to be children’s books.

One can certainly argue that FXL ePub is far more flexible and powerful than Amazon’s truly primitive fixed layout format, but it remains to be seen what the market will want. I’m not sure I would bet against Amazon. I don’t think consumers are exactly clamoring for the type of rich-media ebook experience that FXL ePub is theoretically capable of. Economically, what Amazon is doing seems very pragmatic. Will there be enough demand to support the effort involved in putting high quality, compelling FXL publications together? We’ve been through some of this with ‘multimedia’ ebooks, which have not exactly taken off in any big way.

Moreover, FXL ePub has many of the same limitations as PDF when it comes to mobile devices: text is not resizable, there are many shapes and sizes of screens and a fixed layout cannot adjust to all of them. The experience of reading FXL ePub on a 4″ screen is not going to be any more pleasant than a PDF is. Quite possibly it will be less pleasant: at least you can reflow PDF in many cases (will app developers have to figure out how to reflow FXL too?). PDF typography is better. What screen aspect ratio do you design for? 4×3? 16×9? What text size is big enough?

Another use case is ‘photography books’. That at least is something that FXL should be better at than PDF. But perhaps mobile apps are an even better platform for this.

Ironically it is the leveraging of web technologies that is often touted as a strength of FXL ePub. It’s also ironic that InDesign has emerged as the leading creation tool, given its lack of any foundation in web technologies. The concept of ‘fixed layout’ seems quite antithetical to web technology, but is quite natural to InDesign.

Open specifications are no guarantee of interoperability, as we have seen over many years of web development. At least it has to work on Readium and iBooks. Maybe that is not so impossible, as those two that must account for 90% of what is not Amazon.

I will have to leave it to others to chime in with ‘what is better’ and what the market opportunities are. I can’t seem to overcome my skepticism at this point. But I do look forward to developments, and to future learnings.

I thought that the PDF specification itself has been an open standard for some years now?

Personally I have no problem handling PDFs on any of my devices, but as Laura mentioned the stumbling block seems to be the difficulty of selling them with Amazon or Apple. I don’t think Amazon’s Print Replica format is generally available to authors? Anyway, InDesign Magazine, O’Reilly and Zinio (I think) seem to manage quite well selling PDFs.

So what’s the real reason for this poor man’s PDF format which has virtually no interoperability?

PDF has several ISO standard specs. But FXL is driven by IDPF (NOT ‘IPDF,’ ha-ha), and history with ePub spec. So they were naturally biased to solutions that derive from web technology, as ePub does. And IPDF includes major publisher participation, so I have to assume they are getting what they want out of it.

No, Print Replica is not available via KDP. But there really aren’t any people self-publishing textbooks, which is the only type of reading Print Replica is used for. These same books generally offer rental terms as well. Companies like Chegg also offer PDFs-as-textbooks.

Just catching up with this. You’re saying that probably people will not want to read photo books or children’s books on a mobile small screen, but actually, that’s where having an epub of some variety would be great for a nature guide, with picture and identification of plants, birds, etc. I’m being encouraged to just put the files into pdf which of course I can do, but which don’t look fantastic on an iphone! Ideas on what direction to go would be appreciated.

Are there any interactive features that work in ePub fixed layout and don’t work in PDF or vice versa?

I think the main issue with interactive PDF is that vendor support in the mobile space is virtually non-existent (even for Adobe Reader I think). That’s surely the attraction of FXL. Though it seems the only viable authoring tool for the latter is InDesign, and hand-coding is not really an option.

Note that Amazon now has a tool for building Print Replica and accepts that via KDP. Almost certainly it doesn’t support audio or video, and Kindle platform offers little in the way of accessibility support for Print Replica/PDF.