Hacker News Reader

Comment by josteink | Hacker News Reader

> - this is critical for reading academic papers, which tend to be two-column PDFs

Kindle's and PDFs goes together badly. This is common knowledge.

My solution is only using web-pages based formats like mobi or epub based books.

The rest... Let's say they don't get in my reading list.

Just like the web is nicer without flash, ebooks are just nicer without publishing formats like PDFs which natively can't support reflow or anything super basic required for easy reading.

View on HN

> Just like the web is nicer without flash, ebooks are just nicer without publishing formats like PDFs.

Web is nice because of flash. The video tag in HTML5 happened only after successes of services like Youtube and Vimeo and hundreds of others after they set off on their paths with Macromedia flash. Stop fooling yourself with that kool-aid against flash in recent years.

It's dated for sure, but credit be given where credit is due.

People tend to forget what a blessing Flash was when it first arrived on the web, how horrible other plugins were, like the awful Java mess. Everytime a Java-applet tried to run, you could only pray it wouldn't crash your browser and take your whole system down. Or the terrible experience called RealPlayer! Sure, Flash has a bad security reputation, for good reason, but it made the web more beautiful, interactive,fun and usable at the beginning of the new century. All you had to do was click on "Skip website intro".

I haven't forgotten. Even today, creating dynamic apps in flex using xml and actionscript is easier, more performant and saner than using HTML5. If only the flash player wasn't a minefield of bugs and security vulnerabilities. :(

I highly doubt Flash did anything to significantly change this. After images and audio, the web was screaming for video. If it weren't for flash, perhaps we'd instead have links that opened up native video players, or whatever, and we'd be better off for it.

In short: YouTube would have been a success even in the alternate universe where Flash never existed.

> flash, perhaps we'd instead have links that opened up native video players, or whatever, and we'd be better off for it.

That's a hilarious mother of all assumptions. Kool-aid has taken a full effect on you! :-)

Steam engines were an amazing innovation as well. They brought countless improvements to society, and were a precursor to true internal combustion. However, no one relies on them in normal daily life anymore as there are much better alternatives. We can move on from a technology and still honor what it brought to the world.

This is not a good comparison as the majority of electricity is generated by steam engines.

> Kindle's and PDFs goes together badly.

My point was that KOReader makes them go together nicely. :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com