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Comment by JohnFen | Hacker News Reader

This is another example of why eBooks cannot be considered anything more than temporary.

For exactly this reason (TFA) I have a private DRM-free epub collection with nice metadata and high-res covers that can be backed up and copied as I like. It contains (for my pace) years or maybe decades of reading material.

The important key there bein' "DRM-free" … The file format (epup, pdf, plaintext, whatever) doesn't matter quite as much as that particular detail, as long as the file format is one that doesn't require a proprietary reader. If I can't buy a book in a lasting and reliable (cross-platform-friendly) file format, then I'm not buyin' it. (Your choice of epub is certainly an especially good option to go with in that regard.)

That’s only for those restricted by DRM. I make sure that I get DRM free copies through some means. Humankind wouldn’t have progressed to where it is now if a strict DRM-like mechanism had been invented a few thousand years ago.

Right. If I can't buy the ebook as a pdf, I'm not buying it.

get it in epub if you can. PDF is a crappy, frozen format unless you need the specific layout control it brings.

I have a program that converts PDFs to text, in case PDFs become unreadable in the future.

PDF is an open format with open-source software to read it (such as libpoppler). I don't see how they could become unreadable in the future, any more than JPEG could.

And for this same reason, PDF is quite ill suited for small screens like smartphones or tablets.

I prefer ePub for the reflow of text that adapts to the screen size and allows the user to select fonts and other reading settings (like spacing, justification, etc.).

Pdfs make maths work, epubs look absolutely horrible.

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