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PaulHouleyesterday at 4:42 PM4 repliesview on HN

It'll be in PDF sooner, and my experience is that PDF >> any other system for ebooks. I liked the idea of EPUB but when I recently installed an EPUB reader to read some files I was shocked at how awful it looked whereas for 15 years I've been reading PDF files on tablets with relish.


Replies

mubou2yesterday at 4:53 PM

Have you ever tried reading a PDF ebook on a phone? Small font size, doesn't fill the entire screen (phones are taller), margins make it appear even smaller... even if you have good eyesight it's a pain. The whole point of PDF is to preserve a page layout as authored. EPUB is meant to adapt to your device.

kace91yesterday at 5:51 PM

>and my experience is that PDF >> any other system for ebooks.

Are you speaking just about technical books?

Because I can’t imagine anyone trying to read a novel in epub vs pdf on a phone or epub reader and going with the latter.

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NoMoreNicksLeftyesterday at 5:54 PM

The worst epubs are bad because some jackass took some poorly OCRed text and dumped it into the format. The best (retail) epubs are on par with the best PDFs except you don't have to pan-and-scan to read a fucking page. It just reflows.

For novels I want and prefer epubs, but also non-novels if they were released in the last 5 years or so. PDF isn't magic, and there are bad pdfs out there too, scans of photo-copied books and other nonsense.

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majora2007yesterday at 5:12 PM

That's interesting, I absolutely hate PDF. Lack of metadata for collecting, format is difficult to support, doesn't layout well on mobile, and very limited customization (like dark mode, changing text size, etc).

Only benefit is browsers have built-in support for the format.

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