All major ebook formats and viewers are unpleasant and unimaginative, but one little joy: Google Play's ebooks are (usually) viewable in both the typical shapeless "flowing" mode and *also* original page layouts. Better: they have page mappings, so you can switch back and forth!
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It's nice to use the typical ebook "flowing" mode when on small devices or when doing book-wide search operations; it's nice to use the original page layout in almost all other cases. Buuuuuut: Google Play's books are only viewable on desktop in a web viewer. No dice.
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With effort, you can download the book as a parallel EPUB and PDF (representing the two formats), then but you lose the ability to switch back and forth.
EPUB 3 includes "multiple renditions," which would let you combine both in one file… but no viewer supports this 2015 spec.
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(For that matter, there seems to be no serious desktop EPUB viewer of any kind. Set aside -style dreams of doing anything interesting: none even lets you store annotations in some accessible format, view more than one (non-neighbor) page at once, or link to a page)
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(Speaking of page numbers, most of them will renumber all the pages if you resize the window, even if the EPUB includes a canonical page mapping! The software situation is so poor that I convert ebooks to PDF—not to improve the layout, but to get *slightly* better reading tools!)
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I wonder, what would free flow look like if it still preserved something of (an intentional) page layout?
What is the translation of layout to other media?
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Yeah, I mean, to some extent that's e.g. numinous.productions/ttft and sites like this. Try resizing the browser all the way from desktop-monitor down to mobile. Even the figures adapt…
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Agree with everything you’ve said here. Working on addressing some of these issues in the future with an ebook reader app I’m building!
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As my work on Hyphen 2 kicks into high gear, I'm starting a running thread journaling the design and development process! I'm hoping it'll serve as the basis for a future case study, shorten my feedback loops and give me an opportunity to think out loud. 
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After reading your essay I’ve realized how much I use my spatial-brain to find things I’ve read in a book — “Ah there’s a bit I wanted to show you… it’s ~50pp ago, in the lower-right corner…” Can’t believe how resilient this knowledge is!
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