Ask HN: Why aren't more books offered as Markdown downloads? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why aren't more books offered as Markdown downloads?

4 pointsandrewheekin8 comments

Given the rise of Markdown for personal notes and technical documentation, I'm wondering why more books aren't offered for download in Markdown format. Personally, I would pay a premium to be able to download a book or textbook as Markdown that I could then easily add to an Obsidian vault or other text-based note software.

I could see one reason being that it would make them harder to protect with digital copyright protection, but plenty of textbooks or books are already offered as PDF (protected or non-protected). A similar copyright protection could be added to a text file such as Markdown. Another reason could be that a 10+ mb Markdown file feels unwieldy, but it would be easy to lower the filesize by separating the book into a multiple .md files by chapter. For example, I recently bought a 300-page PDF Kaplan textbook for a financial exam I'm studying to take. I would have much rather purchased a set of Markdown files that I could easily add to note taking software. Is the overall demand for this format too low to justify the support?

I'd say that the overall demand is too low. Plus, aside from self published books, I'm not sure how many publishing houses (of any size) use/support Markdown as a format for their authors.

Markdown is useful for editing, but completely irrelevant to reading. So there simply is no demand for such things. It also greatly limits formatting options compared to the editors that authors and publishers already have, so they would be adding restrictions to their own work by pursuing Markdown.

In general, Markdown's use case is for easy editing of basic formatting in simple documents. Perfect for notes and small bits of documentation. Not perfect for many other things.

PDF and Epub support a featureset that far exceeds Markdown in it's basic specification. Translating from one to the other would be pretty lossy, but possible.

You could probably use Pandoc to do this yourself, but again I'd stress that Markdown is really not meant for rendering PDF or Epub content: https://pandoc.org/

Hm, which features in particular are available in PDF or Epub that couldn't be replicated in Markdown? Everything I can think of (linking, headings, tables, image embedding) can also be done in Markdown. Not to mention embedded HTML could cover even more where Markdown is lacking (ex, subscript, superscript)

Once you're embedding HTML, you might as well just use HTML or something like it - you don't really get any advantage from Markdown. Markdown is supposed to make the (human) writing easier, a finished book needs good rendering on the target device - something richer markup is better suited for.

> Hm, which features in particular are available in PDF or Epub that couldn't be replicated in Markdown?

‘Markdown’ isn’t well defined, but here are a few that I think apply:

- headers and footers on pages

- starting chapters on a new page

- having pages, to start with

- tables where cells have multiple lines of content

- pages with multiple columns of text

- drop caps

- ‘watermarks’ on pages (e.g. a diagonal “Concept” below the text)

- centering or full justifying paragraphs

- multiple kinds of underlines.

- text colors

- control over character and line spacing

- embedded JavaScript (https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/using/applying-actions-scrip...)

- DRM :-) / :-(

> Not to mention embedded HTML could cover even more where Markdown is lacking

Yes, you could use that to include JavaScript for a PDF or ePub renderer and then render those on-page :-)

I immediately thought of “House of leaves”. That one is impossible for markdown unless you go full html+css.

But most classic literature can be just txt file (and it is)

> Given the rise of Markdown for personal notes and technical documentation

This is your problem. You’re thinking a mole hill is a mountain. Tech dorks liking markdown doesn’t mean much.

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