E-text format hassles have finally become the stuff of fiction.

In Grave Secrets, a New York Times best-seller by Kathy Reichs, the problem file is a medical document rather than an e-book. But, yes, it’s a PDF–and an overgrown one at that.

Planet PDF carries an entertaining write-up, while at the same time noting that Ms. Reichs seemed a bit unfair to PDF. Maybe so. Perhaps a quick download of the latest Acrobat Reader would have helped. And, yes, the creators of the crucial file could have made it smaller, using the right techniques. Still, one wonders:

1. Even if the freshest Acrobat can always be downloaded from the Net, how about situations where a fast, easy connection isn’t at hand? Might somebody actually die in a medical emergency someday because time was wasted dealing with a e-book format not on doctor’s system? As it happens, the person involved was presumably dead already. But how about real-life situations? Another argument for a standardized e-book format.

2. Interesting, isn’t it, that even the brains at NIH didn’t follow the right procedures for shrinking the file size.

Meanwhile, separately, PlanetPDF pokes fun at Jakob Nielsen‘s column PDF: Unfit for Human Consumption–with a parody presented in both PDF and HTML. A gas. But, hey, Nielsen still wins in the end. As a Web document, the PDF version is much less readable for me than the HTML.

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