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Alas, it looks like Google Play may be phasing out PDF downloads of original page scans. The last 3 books I've bought have "original pages" as an available format on the store listing, but the download / view option is missing post-purchase. Previously purchased books still work.

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Andy Matuschak

@andy_matuschak

· Oct 18, 2020

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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11:25 PM · Jul 4, 2021Twitter Web App

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This means I no longer have a source of high-quality PDFs for newer books (older ones usually have scans on archive.org or libgen; new books on libgen are usually crappy EPUB -> PDF conversions). I'm happy to pay! Anyone have a source?

Andy Matuschak

@andy_matuschak

Jul 5, 2021

This is a great solution! I hadn't realized that I could just drop-ship books to 1dollarscan via Amazon. Amazing!

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Michael Woods

@carpdiem

· Jul 5, 2021

Replying to @andy_matuschak

1dollarscan.com/sp/ Fantastic (local!) service, and you can send your Amazon orders directly to them. I've used them for dozens of books.

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and

Another problem with pdfs is the changes and passwords that may be in pdfs themselves. I hate it when you gotta have 9 programs from 1994 to the present to assure you can read the pdfs.

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and

I've decided that any book worth my time to read is worth my time to read properly formatted with searchable indexes and copyiable text. Which means, if a pdf isn't available, buying the physical book, scanning it and ocr'ing it using Tesseract.