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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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.
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It’s plausible!
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I'm reliably informed that ( and others) are doing some nice work on the ebook front, and & co built arxiv-vanity.com a few years back which I think is probably the definitive answer to the OP. 😊
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(I unsurprisingly disagree with the premise that PDF is a good format - the problem is in a dearth of careful effort put into typography and layout on web-driven systems; it's absolutely possible to do well)
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That said, ePub 3 (which is not well supported yet) does seem to have a lot of features aimed at making it a web-based successor to PDF. Fixed layout being one of them. edrlab.org/open-standards
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Yes, I’ve seen! I’m worried that we’ll end up with a disjointed ecosystem in which many EPUBs remain glorified plaintext and few publishers take advantage of such features. I hope I’m wrong.
I have a whole rant about markup (see that other reply mentioning annotations). I think it's arguable that trying to push all possible layout commands into a single hierarchical representation (re: HTML or anything similar) is doomed to failure.
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Have you seen this? Seems somewhat in the spirit of what you’re doing. docs.racket-lang.org/pollen/
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