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!
Conversation
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.
1
4
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.
1
4
(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)
Replying to
(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!)
3
10
Industry lacks options because amazon locked the market with DRM.
It’s amazon.
amen. the state of epub readers is so sad - even on iOS I haven't found one that I'm actually happy with and I think I've tried them all. If I had infinite time...
1