I considered a lower price, but Amazon’s ebook royalty system is geared towards higher-priced (or maybe just smaller) ebooks. The Mountain Lion Kindle ebook is $4.99, which is the same price as last year’s Lion ebook.
(I was not involved in the creation of the PDF version, but I imagine I’d find the limitations of the PDF format similarly frustrating.) The Pricing I really wish ebook readers had the same capabilities and behaviors as modern web browsers. 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 a way 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 separated from their associated images by big swaths 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 KF8 readers show the Kindle version, 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 support KF8, however, as does the Kindle Fire. Unfortunately, many Kindle reading devices and applications don’t support Kindle Format 8-most notably, the iOS Kindle app.
KF8-capable readers support amazing new technologies like text that flows around images and the ability to tie a caption to an image. Both ebook formats have severe limitations, most of which are imposed by the reader software.įor the best ebook reading experience, use a device or application that supports Kindle Format 8. They’re both generated from the canonical HTML version. This year, I created the Kindle and ePub versions of the article myself. Some screenshots would also require more pixels than any one of my (non-Retina) displays have. I briefly considered doing every image in the review at Retina resolution, but the Ars Technica CMS currently has no officially supported way to display Retina images to capable browsers. The screenshot of TextEdit in the HiDPI section will actually display at Retina resolution on an iPad, both on the web and in the ebook versions. 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 by topic, if possible, 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 the web browser’s “Find…” feature. That said, I also really like how an Ars Premier subscription eliminates all ads from the Ars Technica web site and gives me the option to view any article on a single page. I can remember I was on page 8 instead of remembering my exact position 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. It has the best formatting and the most features. I consider the web version to be the canonical version.