: Re: CSS3-break will break PDF? In a digital preservation perspective Is there any reason not to use EPUB after CSS3-break standard is incorporated to browsers? Or will this not be a barrier?

@Julie

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First, the Calibre epub reader does include a function to allow you to print an epub file. It accomplishes this by converting it first to a PDF.

There have been efforts to add new features in CSS to make it easier to print (and as a replacement for FOP).

It's already fairly easy to produce both EPUB and PDF. If that is true, there is no special need to make EPUB printable.

The end goal of EPUB is not to produce printable documents, but it's probably true that certain publishers prefer PDF because people can easily download it and print it -- and that feature in missing in EPUB readers. Government bodies, open source communities, educational institutions and businesses probably benefit from letting users print EPUB files. But Adobe Digital Editions does not include the print function for an unencrypted epub file.

Up until now, book publishers have been the main force behind the EPUB working group, and so the print-function has been a low priority. (They don't even want epub reading systems to allow cutting and pasting!) I've seen commentary predicting that the epub group will align itself more closely to the HTML5 standards group, so maybe it will be easier to incorporating the increasing print functionality of CSS.

Currently it is not hard to convert EPUB into the more easily printable PDF. Even Calibre does it relatively easy or well, Adobe Indesign should make such conversions easy to do as well. Incorporating this function into the EPUB reader does not strike me as particularly hard, except Adobe has no commercial incentive to do so.

Another issue is Google. The Google Play epub reader doesn't support page-oriented css (like page-break-before, etc). THE GP reader (and even Readium) don't have print capability even for unencrypted epubs or PDFs. When viewing PDFs in Google Play books on a web browser, you can't even print that. You must open the PDF in the browser itself.

I would guess that scientific publishers like Elsevier have perfected the PDF production process and don't see any real advantage in focusing more on EPUBs -- especially when it's already easy to produce output in both EPUB and PDF (and mobi, etc). With articles and journals, they want to prevent people from printing these things (or at least to control this ability), and Adobe Reader offers these controls already on PDF. Therefore, there's no need for publishers to want a change.

Until an epub reading system (standalone or browser-based) develops a way to allow the publisher to control what printing is allowed and what printed is not allowed, it seems unlikely that printing epubs will ever be urgent for people who build reading systems.

From my standpoint as a small indie publisher, I could care less about whether my unencrypted ebooks are easy to print. If an ebook is unencrypted, then anyone could unzip the file and paste what they want into a MS word document or use Calibre to do it. I see no reason to change my formatting to accommodate the possibility of printing. (Of course, my ebooks are not particularly technical or require elaborate formatting). Maybe my viewpoint will change later.

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