Apr
17
Build It Better: eBooks and My PDF Peeves
by Crystal Clayton, filed under Build It Better
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
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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 ยป A bunch o’ ways to make PDFs
Somehow Similar Posts
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28 Responses to “Build It Better: eBooks and My PDF Peeves”
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Whew! Taking a short break from blogging, folks. More posts coming soon. Thanks for your patience!
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I *love* PDF’s and use them as often as possible, I have probably hundreds of them saved from web pages.I’ll say though, my biggest peeve would be the ones that don’t paginate properly when you print them… half a picture on one page, half on another.I’m looking forward to your post tomorrow too, to see what you use to make your PDF’s - perhaps you’ll have some tips on how to make the photos stay on one page or another.Thanks for a great post today!-Brett
Brett Legree’s last blog post..focus on writing - part 1 - back to the future.
Crystal,
I likes this, I haven’t really thought about PDF’s since I left the cubicle and you really gave me a lot to think about her. I have to admit I was clumsy at them, but at the time I had Adobe Prof. on my computer and was in the middle of learning it went I left. It did have a lot of advantages.
One thing though. If I wanted to alter a PDF, with my version, I could, at least I could some of them. It’s all getting fuzzy now.
Wendi’s last blog post..The Pie Theory: A Story About Pie
Thanks for alerting me to some tricks I didn’t know, showing a new way of using PDFs, and assuring me that my PDF-peeves are warranted! I own the free Acrobat Reader, the hugely expensive Adobe Acrobat 5 (hated the newer versions and had to roll-back to 5), but I use a $9 print-to-PDF software far more often than either of them. Your smart overview clues me in on how much I’m missing, even in using a tiny bit of color in my “can’t mess with this” contracts, policies and creative memos. Thanks!
(I found you through IttyBiz and you’ve earned a new subscriber. Keep up the good work.)
I don’t like PDF’s. I find them clumsy to read and will avoid anything that’s more than a handful of pages.
I probably should not let MY dislike prevent me from offering some of my own efforts in that form, but so far I have. It’s very hard for me to get enthusiastic about producing something I would never want myself.
I need to get by that
Tony’s last blog post..Vista Home Premium by Anthony Lawrence
Hi Tony and welcome!
It makes perfect sense to me that you’d want to spare your customers the hassle you find in PDFs. And I’m curious about the “clumsy” part? Is it moving around in a PDF, or getting the text to a comfortable reading size, or…?
Hi GirlPie and welcome!
Grrrrrl, it is so nice to know that I’m not the only one with PDF-peeves! And I know what you mean about degrading your software. I’m 2 or 3 versions behind on Dreamweaver and prefer Office 2003. Partly because I’m cheap, but also because I don’t feel an urge to hop back on the learning curve for programs I know well, especially when I’m out here trying out new stuff every day!
We’re definitely missing out on some features by not using the professional version (I use CutePDF for “quickies”), but I suspect we can print-to-PDF with our free/cheap versions faster than Acrobat Pro can open.
And if it’s a 1-5 page document that’s meant to be printed—like your to-be-signed contracts—then no big deal. I upload feature-free PDFs to my web fax service (where most features would be wasted) and documents for my pro-printer don’t need automation. But if we’re authoring a 30+ page eBook that folks are likely to read onscreen, then our PDF is gonna need some love.
Thanks so much for subscribing, I’ll do my best!
ps. I just passed Naomi a tiny note, thanking her for sending me cool people
Hi Wendi!
And yup, you could definitely edit a PDF with the professional version, which has come in handy for me, too…many times. Once I set security and other customizations, recreating the PDF for typos and small changes would have been a time-sucking nightmare.
Glad you liked the post, and that it gave you something to think on…your posts have been doing the same for me in a BIG way. My Cannoli Crisis is ebbing
Hiya Brett,
PDFs are the best way to save Web pages aren’t they? It’s the only way I know to get snapshot of the page. In my technical communications class, they were quick to mention that citing website content is OK, but we’d best preserve the text with a PDF because if didn’t AND the site changed/moved/retired, then that bit of the research would have to be removed from our papers.
About the split images, I think we can blame our browsers for that? Does the same thing happen if you print something from a Word (or other word processing) document?
And speaking of tomorrow’s post…it’s now today and I haven’t yet written it! Gotta go!
(and thanks for coming by!)
Hi Crystal,
I agree wholeheartedly - I think I started doing that a few years ago, after finding some resources I had bookmarked were no longer available. And I didn’t want to print them out on paper, so… PDF was the best choice for me!
You are probably right, it is most likely a browser issue - at times when I’ve found it to be a problem, I’ve saved the whole page, then opened it in a word processor, then PDF’d it - that works.
Talk with you soon - Brett
It’s fun and useful to learn even more from the comments and the blogger’s replies than in the post (only because I’m not doing books)! Big info, thanks.
Crystal - re: snapshots of web pages, I use a cheap-easy called SnagIt that lets me capture the page (or any portion of it) with just two clicks from my browser, saved as a jpg (or PDF, gif, bmp, etc.)
And Anyone - ever get stuck when a huge PDF won’t send to or open in a client’s AOL or other lameo system? I’ve tried WinZipping to smallify (am I making up words?) but still get a bounce sometimes. Your ideas?
Thanks for comments and follow-up (BBB = Crystal?) that are worth coming back for!
GirlPie—Another SnagIt lover!
I just finished writing about SnagIt for today’s post, after CutePDF and now I’m on Google Docs.
Such a wunnerful thing, SnagIt, with so many file formats to choose from. I haven’t yet seen anything comparable. Do you use the FireFox toolbar?
And yup, BBB is me
Cheers!
[...] I posted about the glories of PDF documents and highlighted features you can easily leverage for your business. I also had a tiny rant about [...]
@crystal
Clumsy and slow. Yes, it’s moving around, but mostly it’s reading. I can read very, very quickly, but not PDF’s - they slow me down to a crawl, lucky to squeak 500wpm out of them.
Part of that is the necessity to scroll rather than flip a page, but I think that the computer screen is part of it too.. just can’t blast through it!
Recent blog post from Tony Lawrence: Vista Home Premium by Anthony Lawrence
@Tony—Yup, I can see what a crap reading experience that would be.
I don’t know how quickly I can read, but I do know that too much/too fast scrolling gives me motion sickness.
My solution is to go full screen (Ctrl + L), full page (Ctrl + 0 [zero]) so I don’t have to scroll at all, just press the space bar to go to the next page. When I need a break from my desk, I use my OLPC laptop as a reading tablet.
And while I was verifying those hot keys…guess what I found? AUTOSCROLLING! Shift + Ctrl + H…and then use the up and down arrows to control the speed. PUHLEASE let me know if that works for you?!
~Crystal
No, it doesn’t.
I’m sorry, I just don’t like reading anything long on a computer screen - I need a real book in my hands.
It may just be long ingrained habit. After all, it’s only been the past ten years or so that this sort of thing has been common.
Tony, I know how you feel as a fellow speed reader. While I do try to keep things electronic as much as possible, for long documents and especially editing - hard copy and a red pen. Too hard to flip back and forth around a document.
I know it drives the document control people at work nuts as they implemented this craptastic system for document review and control.
I absolutely refuse to use it…
But for shorter stuff (10 pages or less) I don’t have a problem with PDF.
Recent blog post from Brett Legree: focus on writing - part 1 - back to the future.
@Tony @Brett–Oh well, it was worth a shot
For me, I couldn’t enjoy a pleasure book online. I’ve got a long, happy history of curling up with a book and reading all day. I like the visceral bits of reading, though I am also a huge audiobook fan.
Also, I can’t deep edit a long document online. A 1000 word blog post, no problem. But a 20 page term paper gets printed, scribbled on (green pen), fixed online, then reprinted many many times.
BUT I prefer to read large documents online, especially for research. There are huge benefits to Acrobat’s search and annotation features when sloughing through—and returning to—900 pages of text. But paper is my friend in the end because I print all the highlighted bits and my notes for offline consumption now that the book hs been reduced to only what I need + my digital ‘jottings’.
Because of how I use them, I find myself wishing that enjoyable PDFs, like Todoodlist last night, were paper books I could warm up to…while my 4 lb 700 page textbook is an ideal candidate for PDF.
Crystal,
Oh don’t worry, I’m a PDF convert
for the reason you mentioned - search. When you use CutePDF to make a PDF, and then store it and index it with something like Copernic or Google Desktop Search, it becomes a very powerful tool.
So really, I use a mix. For pleasure reading I can do the electronic thing, for work often times it has to be paper. Yet, as I said, the search is nice.
I think we’re all on a similar wavelength here!
Brett
Recent blog post from Brett Legree: focus on writing - part 1 - back to the future.
I agree, though I do have another peeve about PDF’s used where HTML would be perfectly fine (no need for precise pagination and control).
Unless some thing really needs what PDF provides, it should be HTML.
Recent blog post from Tony Lawrence: A thousand meanings never meant by Anthony Lawrence
Brett, now that IS funny! We both use both, but for the opposite purpose (work/pleasure) yet for the same reasons!
I haven’t tried Google Desktop Search…need to look into that. Should realllly clean up my hard drive first. I’m a pack rat even in my paper-less mode
Tony is so right, it hasn’t been that long, it just seems like always (to me, anyway). It’s nice that we have options now. Books can be impractical, no matter how much I love ‘em.
Like, I went to Crete a couple of years ago with a little heap of novels and a MP3 player full of audiobooks. When it was time to take the 13-hour 3-flight return trip, the much-enjoyed-but-weighty books didn’t come back with me
Instead, they became the newest additions to the resort library! But the audiobooks were great company the long right home…
Hi Tony! Your HTML/PDF comment just popped in, guess we were typing together
And yup, that’s a little weird. I mean, I think it’s nice to have a PDF version so the content is more portable…but not instead of HTML—best to have in addition to it.
Like at http://ralliance.biz/biographies/ , the Web page has the entire biography, but a prettier, print-friendly, easy to store PDF is available, too. In this context, it’s nice to have both.
Here’s another option I tripped over yesterday, so site visitors who want a PDF can make their own…takes the burden off the author to create them: http://www.pdfonline.com/web2pdf/
Crystal,
I thought that myself actually! I guess it just shows how each of us can use tools in different ways…
You should try Google Desktop Search or Copernic Desktop Search, I use both depending on what I’m doing. GDS of course is good if you use Gmail. Copernic has some nice features that Google does not. So, why not try both?
Recent blog post from Brett Legree: windows live writer sucks. or, fail early, fail often.
Of course if you have OS X Leopard you have Spotlight with a tap of Apple-Space.
Recent blog post from Tony Lawrence: No plans for a Mac or Linux version by Anthony Lawrence
@Tony—Ahhh, you Mac users will be the death o’ me…all these cryptic, unattainable temptations
@Brett—Hmmm…Copernic and GSD? Sounds like a series of posts on finding stuff! Many thanks for pointing those out
@Crystal - as Tony pointed out, the Mac does this out of the box. Vista sort of (sort of) has this built in too, but it isn’t as good as on OS X or with the aftermarket search programs.
OS X tends to have a lot of neat stuff built in that you have to go find with other operating systems.
In any case, that would be a great set of blog posts and I’m happy that I was able to share that information with you.
Recent blog post from Brett Legree: foot fetish? six weeks to a marathon.
[...] I’ve always loved to read, so instant access to any book is way tempting. Even moreso if the PDF has color pictures and a groovy layout, and promises to make my dreams come true: an empty Inbox, a clean house, a second car and a happy [...]
[...] ecourses, Joan Stewart, or her products. But her ecourse plucked the same nerve as my peeves with lackluster PDFs: great tools wielded ineffectively cost us results, customers, time, and [...]
[...] previous Build It Better articles we learned how not to administer an ecourse, poked at PDF ebooks, and redesigned some business [...]