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Comment by rinich | Hacker News Reader

That's great if you're fine with not reading anything written while we were alive.

You could always buy Kindle books and strip the DRM from them. Unless they're the Topaz format, then you apparently can't.

I can't vouch for the service, but there's ebooks.com .

Personally, I prefer formats more flexible than PDFs, like plain text files.

DRM issues. Pricing issues. Platform issues. And, apparently, customer service issues. The ebook has a little more maturing to do, so for contemporary books I'd still stick with physical copies.

How is a plain text file more flexible than a PDF? It's trivial programatically to extract plain text from a PDF so it's as least as good as .txt?

Actually, it is not trivial to programmatically extract plain text from a PDF in a consistent format. In many cases it is easy, but the PDF format is visual first and content second, resulting in plenty of opportunities for Captcha-like problems.

Despite that, PDF, especially PDF-A, is the superior format for preserving published content.

Huh, I didn't realize that PDF hasn't been propriety format since 2008. That's awesome.

Reading plain text files is simpler to do across platforms. If an app on a mobile device just pays attention to the text then that's fine for functionality, I guess. But then I have a problem with the extra formatting being there, unused. Kind of like having a problem with unused CSS in a style sheet just sitting there.

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