Hacker News Reader

Comment by Luyt | Hacker News Reader

I bought a BeBook, which is a rebranded Hanlin. Why? Because it's an open platform: I run OpenInkpot on it, and I even could write my own software for it if I wanted to. It doesn't have wifi, but I don't miss it; I copy ebooks and texts on it using the USB cable. It displays flat plain text files fast and well. As for readability on portable electronic devices, nothing can beat an e-Ink display in the bright sun ;-)

View on HN

But where do you get complete books to read on it?

I use Project Gutenberg to get free ebooks.

http://www.gutenberg.org

That's great if you're fine with not reading anything written while we were alive.

I can't vouch for the service, but there's ebooks.com .

Personally, I prefer formats more flexible than PDFs, like plain text files.

DRM issues. Pricing issues. Platform issues. And, apparently, customer service issues. The ebook has a little more maturing to do, so for contemporary books I'd still stick with physical copies.

How is a plain text file more flexible than a PDF? It's trivial programatically to extract plain text from a PDF so it's as least as good as .txt?

Huh, I didn't realize that PDF hasn't been propriety format since 2008. That's awesome.

Reading plain text files is simpler to do across platforms. If an app on a mobile device just pays attention to the text then that's fine for functionality, I guess. But then I have a problem with the extra formatting being there, unused. Kind of like having a problem with unused CSS in a style sheet just sitting there.

Actually, it is not trivial to programmatically extract plain text from a PDF in a consistent format. In many cases it is easy, but the PDF format is visual first and content second, resulting in plenty of opportunities for Captcha-like problems.

Despite that, PDF, especially PDF-A, is the superior format for preserving published content.

You could always buy Kindle books and strip the DRM from them. Unless they're the Topaz format, then you apparently can't.

pdfchm.com

Reply on news.ycombinator.com