yes, we (scientists and scholars) still rely on the exchange of PDFs to communicate research. This is a pity. The problem is that a scholarly paper in PDF, even when it is on the web, it is essentially a photograph of a (physical, analog) paper. As such, a PDF fails to expose the living, dynamic, interactive nature of research. The baseline motivation for Authorea is to expose such nature: to expose the data underlying plots and images, to allow articles to be forked and cloned, to enable web-native data visualizations, to get version control right, and so on. We are trying to move in this direction!