Comment by PaulHoule 2 days ago
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.
That’s a pretty judgemental statement out of nowhere - and completely ignored the ebook readers part, which are devices literally created for this purpose.
As for phones, screens nowadays are almost the same size as readers and with more resolution. E-ink is more comfortable for longer sessions, but if you find such a size unusable you might just have poor eyesight.
As someone who is super nearsighted, the smaller screen on a phone is great for reading, especially in contexts like bedtime reading where I want to have my glasses off.
I have read many hundreds of books this way.
The problem with a tablet is that most tablets, especially the sort that are good for seeing entire as-printed pages at once, are too big for me to keep the entire screen in focus without wearing glasses. (with that said, foldables improve things here, since the aspect ratio bottleneck is typically width so being able to double the width on the fly makes such things more readable.
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.
There is a mode for PDF files that reflows and is logically similar to EPUB in that there is an HTML-derived data model and you have images embedded in the PDF much as they are embedded in the EPUB. Of course if you hate how complex PDF is it is more to hate.
There might be something said for academic texts with their tables of figures and diagrams and so forth. But even then, PDF can be nasty.
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.
One thing I like about PDF is the annotations (notes & highlights) are embedded in the PDF itself. That is not the case for EPUB files, each EPUB reader stores annotations in its own proprietary format.
Very true, I just rolled out annotations for Kavita (a self-hosted book/comic server) and epub doesn't have the ability to store it in the file (although Kavita has a no-modification policy).
Although for cases like Kavita, storing in the file would be problematic if multiple users want their own annotations without concerns of data leaking.
> Lack of metadata for collecting
PDFs have pretty excellent support for metadata. If the collection software doesn't support at least Dublin Core, that may be kind of their own fault...
I haven't seen this in the real world or the tooling to back it up. Currently, Calibre is the only software that writes metadata that pulls from online sources.
I'm sure Adobe Acrobat also supports, but that's not used in the scene.
Feels like a very big gap in the OSS world then. The PDF spec supports multiple standards for metadata, Acrobat has workflows for all of them, and Adobe sells into a bunch of verticals (such as public libraries) that rely on this functionality heavily.
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.