The Future Of The Ebook Isn’t PDF

Over the last couple of week’s the blogosphere has seen some euphoria over Seth Godin’s release of his PDF book Knock Knock’ – a starter guide for web publishing, I think.

I say ‘I think’ because I haven’t read the ebook. I’m sure it’s full of great ideas written in a way that only Godin can muster. The problem is it’s in PDF. I find it PDFs over 2 pages long a pain to read. PDF isn’t the future of ebooks – and Godin should reconsider his strategy for his next book.

The PDF isn’t useful because it’s no longer the format for the way we live and work today. PDF’s require you to spend a lot of time in front of a screen but we live in the world where we zap from one piece of information to another, one blog post to another. My work-style doesn’t allow extended screen time either: I don’t only work at home, I work at an office I have been leant, in the cafe where I have lunch, in the lobby of any hotel with WiFi, on my phone in the street, upstairs in the Apple Store, crouched over my screen outside an airline’s executive lounge in Newark.

Could I just digest it in chunks? Come on, which is more likely: me returning to a file on my hard drive or to a blog that has a post highlighted on my RSS Reader. And another thing too: I have three computers (don’t you?): That’s three desktops to save the same document too.

There are a lot of pages in Knock Knock (I finally downloaded it as I wrote this so I could check) – could I just print it off? I don’t have a printer at home, I don’t use a printer at work because I never have to these days. If I did print it, I’m sure I’d leave it on the printer until the guy from Accounts finally recycles it.

We’re in an age of links, trackbacks, dynamic updatable content – and the PDF is quite frankly a dinosaur. There’s no point making a book an ebook if you don’t make the content accessible. Many traditional books are in a poor format for our modern lifestyle – I have several business books at home half read, getting dusty. However, two books that I read in a flash recently was Tom Peter’s Trends and Robyn Waters’ Trendmaster books. Why? They were booklets – short, concise, could fit in my pocket so I could read anywhere, anytime on my ever-changing schedule (and I could take my eyes away from the screen for once).

OK, ok. So maybe you think I live some freak lifestyle – if it is then ask yourself – is it very different from your work-style in your next job?

When I emailed back and forth with James Torio of Blog Thesis fame yesterday we talked about the PDF format of his thesis. “I’m not a big fan on PDF,” he told me and so I suggested that he republish the thesis in blog format – blogs are not only far more digestible, instant – James can release his thesis page by page over time and append in real time content that relates to what he has written or even update examples. And so can others through comments.

James ebook becomes alive through the blog format. And people like me read it and talk about it because of its content, not because of its author.