Hacker News Reader

Comment by teekert | Hacker News Reader

If you are an avid reader with and e-reader you sort of start to hate pdf and it feels annoying if you follow some links to an ebook and you get… a pdf.

Still, for the tablet readers of course it could be a nice extra option, I agree. It takes some effort though.

View on HN

Interesting... I am an avid reader (and an obsessive bibliophile!) but I have the opposite reaction to yours regarding file formats. Pdf is perfection, then I like djvu and then well-formatted plain text files. Epubs are a thing of horror, that invariably botches all the formulas and destroys the flow of the pages.

It has gotten to the point where if something is in epub format, I don't even bother to download it.

I guess you don't read on smaller device. Kindle, for example, with 6-7" screen, is not going to read A4-formatted PDF well at all. On phone, too. A4-sized PDF only works well on 10" device or larger.

Sounds more a problem with the kindle and its software than with the pdf format itself. Books are typically set at around 65 characters per line. This is perfectly readable even on a small phone screen, in landscape orientation and without margins. Think about it: a typical phone is taller than the width of a paperback book. The space is there, if you cannot get it to work it's a software problem.

> This is perfectly readable even on a small phone screen, in landscape orientation and without margins.

That's a lot of condition to be perfectly readable.

EPUB is readable even without all those conditions because it's reflowable.

(And personally I hate using landscape mode on my phone/Kindle)

Your perfectly readable isn’t everyone’s perfectly readable, and the benefit of ePubs is that they’re reflowable, unlike PDF. Having said that, why don’t you try our ePubs? We spend a lot of time on them to make sure that they’re not “things of horror” :)

Hmm I read everything on PocketBook HD3, perhaps that is where we differ?

Surely. I've never used an "ebook" platform. Just laptops, tablets and phones. There are very good pdf viewers on each of those.

Ah yes this explains it. I very much prefer epaper over other screens for reading, also I enjoy my reading device to be just that, a reading device (with a battery that lasts me weeks to months).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com