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An unintuitive secret of reading books on computers: reading PDFs with original typesetting is much better than reading ebooks, which treat text like a 4chan shitposter and have impoverished reading software. But… where to get the PDFs?! A survey & suggestions for future work:

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Jesse Vincent

@obra

Oct 18, 2020

Do you think it isn’t plausible for epub readers to improve their typography and layout enough to be worthwhile? As I’ve gotten into my 40s, being able to adjust text size and reflow content to fit the device I’m reading on had been a godsend.

It’s plausible!

(Both

and

put some effort into this a few years back and had pretty nice looking stuff.)

Blaine Cook

@blaine

Oct 18, 2020

I'm reliably informed that

@fable

(

@buzz

and others) are doing some nice work on the ebook front, and

@bfirsh

& co built arxiv-vanity.com a few years back which I think is probably the definitive answer to the OP. 😊

Buzz Andersen

@buzz

Oct 18, 2020

Yeah, I basically spend all my time now on ePub. I’ve learned a hell of a lot in the past year.

Replying to

That’s the most promising news I’ve heard about this space in a very long time, Buzz!

8:36 PM · Oct 18, 2020Twitter Web App

Replying to

Started out with an open source iOS project called FolioReader but have gradually rewritten a lot of it (in no small part because Apple’s deprecation of UIWebView kind of forced me to).