Why Reflowable ePub Outperforms Proprietary eBook Formats
We've spent the last few years rushing toward proprietary formats and interactive PDFs, pretending that "rich media" is what makes a document better. It isn't. Most of the time, it just makes a file harder to open and impossible to read on a phone. We've forgotten that a reflowable, open standard is actually what a reader wants. I've spent a lot of time fighting with fixed-layout documents. There is nothing more frustrating than pinching and zooming on a mobile screen just to read a single paragraph of text. It's a lazy way to handle design that puts the burden on the user instead of the author. The industry seems to think that adding a few embedded videos or fancy animations justifies locking content into a closed ecosystem. But the real win isn't in the bells and whistles. It's in the ability for text to adapt to whatever screen it happens to be on. The question is why we're moving backward when the tools to do this right already ex...