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Comment by jonah-archive | Hacker News Reader

It looks like this is a link directly to the PDF on one of our servers. You can link to e.g. https://archive.org/details/FDNYforcibleEntryReferenceGuide and it will serve from one of the servers that can source the item even if this particular server is offline, and will be valid in the future if the item is ever moved off of this server.

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It's a good point to make. But dang, why must there be a built-into-the-page PDF reader that I have to fart around with? I'd rather just have a simple PDF that gets served from some load-balanced location, so I can use my own viewing tools. I'm sure there are good reasons, and I realize there is a download link in the "..." menu, so it's not too bad, at least. Just griping (:

I guess a more direct analog to the original link would be https://archive.org/download/FDNYforcibleEntryReferenceGuide... , which will take you directly to the PDF and provides the load-balanced benefits.

I linked to the item's main page, which has other download options for different e-readers, metadata, etc, in addition to the bookreader interface (which provides additional options like Read Aloud and Search Inside (and it's open source! https://github.com/internetarchive/bookreader ).

Quick question: What is the caching / download mechanism like in bookreader? Does it only download each page as requested, cache a few pages around the current page, or download the whole thing before display? I am looking for something better than what we have cooked up to avoid downloading an entire pdf every time somebody wants to see a couple pages of it.

I’m sure it works pretty well on desktop browsers, but on mobile the web interface is pretty hard to use. The PDF link though works great.

There's a list of download options on the right if you scroll down.

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