Build It Better: eBooks and My PDF Peeves

Adobe’s PDF (Portable Document Format) files are an author’s BFF, and for good reasons. PDF documents:

• Can be secured against editing, copying, and printing
• Maintain the appearance of the original document
• Can be optimized for small file size
• Can be read on any (maybe every) computing platform and operating system with Adobe’s free Acrobat Reader
• Have reader-friendly features such as hyperlinks, text search, bookmarks, and various viewing and navigation options

I’m a bookworm from wayyyy back, but in many ways I believe PDFs are better than paper, with some clear advantages for business use:

• No-cost distribution
  Customers and clients can download the PDF file from your site, or you can attach the PDF file to an email. Sure, you pay for hosting and possibly bandwidth, but compared to packaging and shipping, it’s free.
• Immediately available
  Since customers won’t have to wait for your book/booklet/brochure/flyer to be delivered, they’ll be exposed to your message while your offer/product/service is still fresh in their mind.
  Doubt the importance of this? Check out Amazon Upgrade, where a few extra dollars gets you online access to the book you just ordered but won’t receive for days.
  
• Free color
  It doesn’t cost anything extra to add visual spice to your PDF document with color text, images, or photos. Compare that to costly color copies or pricey professional color printing.
• Environmentally-friendly
  Customers can choose whether to print all, some, or none of your PDF document. The cost and environmental burden of printing is shifted to your customer, and likely saves a tree (or twenty).

Of course there are occasions when a PDF document isn’t better than a booklet or brochure, like handouts and back table upsells at a speaking engagement, or many other real-world interactions. But PDFs are tough to beat when you’re reaching out to customers from the Web.

Which is why I get super snarky when eBook authors ignore the obvious benefits and distribute documents that are:

Impossible to navigate

I have a slew of PDF documents that don’t use hyperlinks, and I like the authors less when I find they’ve ignored this feature. I consider Web-style navigation a top benefit of PDFs, so it’s a top peeve when an author doesn’t link from the table of contents, index, and cross-references to pages in the document. Even worse is when the document has URLs that aren’t clickable. Why distribute a PDF document that’s as “dumb” as a paper document?

Hard to print

From an author’s perspective, a hard to print PDF document is not necessarily a bad thing. Awkward page dimensions and lots of color are effective soft security strategies against printing. Readers who want to conserve paper and ink are discouraged from printing documents with these layout features. Acrobat’s low-resolution print settings are another effective method. But readers who want a break from their computers will be ticked they can’t read your document offline.

Too secure

When Sallie Mae emails my student loan documents, I’m glad for a password-protected PDF (even if the password is only my Social Security number). Any other time it’s an unnecessary hassle! For protected PDFs that I’ve purchased, I add the password to the filename to avoid having to look it up. It’s not like I’ll remember the password…it’s something the author invented. And how secure is it really? If I wanted to share the document illicitly (though I wouldn’t), I’d simply forward the password with the file.

Painfully vanilla

I love vanilla ice cream. I less-than-love black and white PDF files. Here is a golden opportunity to add zing and bling to a document at no additional cost, and some authors stick to the same ol’ same ol’. Seriously? There’s no call for dooming your document to black-and-white as a courtesy to readers who will print it. They can set their printer to black-and-white, but folks reading your document onscreen can’t add color. Your visually underwhelming document is draining the life out of your onscreen readers who are used to zesty web sites and vibrant PowerPoint presentations.

Introducing: PDF All-Stars

How to Start a Business Blog
Free download with subscription
Horizontal layout maximizes onscreen reading. Standard page size and Notes areas for those who print. Table of contents and bookmarks hyperlink to chapters, sections, and exercises. Colored lines, links, and subheading text.

InDesign Magazine
Free trial download for email address
Password protected download area, not document. Offer separate PDFs: one optimized for onscreen reading, the other laid out for printing. Mad full-color eye candy on every page.

Before and After Magazine
Free trial download
Onscreen and printable versions in the same file. Hyperlinks on every page for document navigation, printing instructions, “share with friend”, and more. Plenty of glorious color in a simple, sexy layout.

Which is all to say…

How an author uses (or underuses, or misuses, or abuses) PDF document features is a personal thing. If they deliberately cripple PDFs for security, out of pure cussedness, or because they’re admittedly too lazy to learn how to improve them, then whatever.

But if you’d like examples of authors who don’t cheat their readers out of the cool bits, be sure to take a peek at those all-star freebies.

Et tu? Have you read or made a PDF that needed a little more love? What do you like or dislike about Adobe PDF documents?

Tomorrow » A bunch o’ ways to make PDFs

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