Comment by znpy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by znpy | Hacker News Reader

ePub aren't that great either. PDF might not be perfect, but it's likely the best we have and the best we'll have in a long time.

ePub renders wildly different on my eReader (kobo), my linux laptop (various apps), my iPad and my iphone. And i'm not talking about screen sizes, i'm talking about various elements being rendered largely incorrectly (and there's a matrix of incorrectness across implementations.

PDF documents on the other hands... they render just right, everywhere. I have to zoom and scroll, but I will never have to ask myself "will I be able to actually read this document?" when dealing with PDF.

Oh and by the way... I still print stuff from time to time. Yeah way less than it was needed in the past, but it's still a necessity. Can you even print stuff (sections? pages? selections?) from an ePub?

> Bene is designed to make opening and reading an EPUB feel fast and non-committal. The app is much quicker to open on my Macbook (<1sec) than other desktop apps.

This is elitist at best. Claiming something "is fast" on top-class hardware is misleading at best (if not dishonest).

Try and running that on low class hardware (stuff like chromebooks but also laptops from at least 7-8 years ago) and let's see if it's still "fast".

I'm not convinced.

> PDF documents on the other hands... they render just right, everywhere. I have to zoom and scroll,

To me it feels the other way around, if I have to zoom and scroll, they render just almost right.

And that almost is extremely important for actual reading. If you're quickly skimming a PDF, sure. But to sit down and read for 30 minutes? One hour? Fuck zooming and scrolling. My kindle just displays a page, and I tap it and it goes to the next page. Can't really get a much better reading experience than that.

If I’m reading that long, I don’t need zooming and scrolling on my ipad.

Epub on ereaders work well but only if you’re reading fiction. Most images and almost all tables and charts have been messed up by epub rendering anyway. And ereaders are black and white, so you’re losing information anyways.

right, this goes against what you said about rendering well everywhere, given how you mentioned your ipad. In any other device you will likely need to zoom and scroll constantly.

Tables and charts are also a specific use case. There's no mention of them whatsoever on the website so one can assume this is talking about mainly text.

In other words, you described the only time when PDF are more comfortable: if you have an iPad and you need to read charts/images/tables. Far from the claim of "they render just right everywhere".

I have a six year old laptop and regularly read ePubs on it (also my PocketBook e-reader) – it's fast enough. The initial page calculations can take a few seconds, but this can (and is) cached and done in the background. It's not that bad and "time to something useful on screen" is more than acceptable. Large PDFs also aren't exactly fast by the way.

Most e-readers are "low class hardware". ePubs work fine on most of them.

In terms of performance there isn't a clear winner here; both can be somewhat slow at times for large documents, but are also "fast enough" for the common case, even on older low-spec hardware.

I do think the general software ecosystem surrounding ePubs is not quite there yet, but that's mostly a matter of UX and "software that hadn't been written yet". As a format ePub is the clear winner for many (not all) scenarios. I struggle reading many PDFs because "zoom and scroll" that you mention is a right pain if you have to constantly do it (which you often do if you zoom text). Comfortably reader PDFs on my phone or e-reader is basically impossible.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com