![]() ![]() ![]() I really wish ebook readers had the same capabilities and behaviors as a modern web browser. Most (all?) ebook reader applications also don’t provide a nice way to have a text link briefly display an image on top of the content, or to show a larger, un-cropped version of an inline image. Lesser reader applications and devices display the Kindle and EPUB files in progressively more depressing ways. This can cause the image captions to be separate from their associated images by a big swath of whitespace. Open the same ebook file in both the Mac and iOS Kindle reader applications and you’ll see two very different appearances.Īpple’s iBooks app displays the EPUB version of the book almost as well as the Kindle Format 8 readers, but it has an annoying habit of stretching the content to fit the vertical space of the page when a large image causes a mid-page break. The Kindle ebook is a single file that contains two versions of the content: one in Kindle Format 8, and one in the older Kindle format. The Mac version does, however, as does the Kindle Fire. Most notably, the iOS Kindle app still does not support Kindle Format 8. Unfortunately many Kindle reading devices and applications don’t support Kindle Format 8. Kindle Format 8 readers support amazing new technologies such as text that flows around images and the ability to tie a caption to an image. Reading the Kindle version using a device or application that supports Kindle Format 8 provides the best experience of any of the ebook formats. Both ebook formats have severe limitations, most of which are imposed by the reader software. They’re both generated from the canonical HTML version of the article. ![]() This year, I created the Kindle and EPUB versions of the article myself. This year, Ars Technica actually asked me to merge several pages together to reduce the total number of pages (and I did). I like to break it up on logical section boundaries, which means that the “pages” vary widely in length. Some people think Ars Technica forces me to break my article up into many tiny pages. I use single-page view on very long articles when I’m searching for some text using my web browser’s “Find…” feature. That said, I also really like how an Ars Premier subscription eliminates all ads from the Ars Technica website and gives me the option to view any article on a single page. I can remember I was on page 8 instead of remembering the exact point in a very long, scrolling web page. I actually like it for very long articles because it helps me keep my place across multiple reading sessions. This kind of pagination annoys some people. The free web version has ads, and it’s split up into multiple “pages” (which are actually much longer than a single printed page). A web browser is the best place to inspect and follow those links. I believe that good writing for the web includes a lot of links. I consider the web version to be the canonical version, and the version with the best formatting and the most features. Here are my thoughts on the various reading options. Download an iBooks-compatible EPUB file.Subscribe to Ars Premier for a month for $5 and get all of these options:.As I have for the past 13 years (yikes!), I wrote a review of the latest major release of the Mac operating system, OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, for Ars Technica. ![]()
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