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| ▲ | mubou2 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | kace91 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| >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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| ▲ | PaulHoule 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | I am mostly reading on a tablet, not a phone. I think if you are reading on a phone you are already screwed —- if people are “reading” on phones I think 80% of it is that you just read less. | | |
| ▲ | kace91 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | NoMoreNicksLeft 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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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| ▲ | PaulHoule 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | Finnucane 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I oversee ebook production for a uni press so I am familiar with how the proverbial sausage is made. Which is why I still mainly prefer print books. | | |
| ▲ | NoMoreNicksLeft 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | majora2007 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| 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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| ▲ | leosanchez 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | | | |
| ▲ | swiftcoder 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > 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... |
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