Conversation

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.

Quote Tweet

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:

Show this thread

Andy Matuschak

@andy_matuschak

Jul 4, 2021

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?

Scott Jenson

@scottjenson

Jul 5, 2021

As a UX designer, I'm intrigued. PDF files can't reformat so how can reading them as PDF be better? Are you using a large format e-reader tablet to view them full size?

Andy Matuschak

@andy_matuschak

Jul 5, 2021

Yes, I read them on a reMarkable, or on my large display at full size.

Replying to

and

If it were possible to create an environment which could fluidly reflow books while retaining the quality of a professional typesetter's page layout, that'd be great! Alas, EPUB readers are uniformly quite poor.

4:55 AM · Jul 5, 2021Twitter Web App

Likes