7 ms·

If you've tried opening up lots of epub files (I have), you'll soon learn that there are a huge range of layouts and ugliness under the hood. Yes it's HTML, and

by vertis 5y ago

If you've tried opening up lots of epub files (I have), you'll soon learn that there are a huge range of layouts and ugliness under the hood. Yes it's HTML, and therefore you can preserve a good portion of the knowledge even if you didn't have an ereader (though you need zip), but it would still be a pain to extract and reformat at scale. Disclaimer: I probably spend too much time thinking about this from a 'long now' perspective.

wolverine876 5y ago
> Disclaimer: I probably spend too much time thinking about this from a 'long now' perspective. That's great! What have you come up with? AFAICT, PDF - or PDF/A - is currently the only good format for long-term text document (e.g., books) preservation. It's the only format that's stable over the long-term (at least PDF/A is), it's the only universally supported format, and it's the only option with stable annotations (which is essential to me). The major downside is that the actual text is hard to extract and integrate with other functions. That's why I have hopes for epub.