5 ms·

It would be nice if we could read these books online rather than having to download a file and find some sort of reading app for it. Like, what am I supposed to

It would be nice if we could read these books online rather than having to download a file and find some sort of reading app for it. Like, what am I supposed to do with an "azw3" file? And do I really want evidence of piracy sitting on my hard disk?

t-3 4y ago
OK, but without seeders the project will die. If you only want to leech, maybe you should stay away from appeals for participation?
kristofferR 4y ago
Azw3 is main Kindle format, the best viewer apps for them are Calibre or even the official Kindle app. It does have previews for PDFs, better formats aren't easily displayed in a browser.
constantcrying 4y ago
In all likelihood the book you are looking for is available as a .pdf The "best" format for reading books is epub, as it is an opwn format which does not try to adapt a paper format. There are many free readers available for it. >And do I really want evidence of piracy sitting on my hard disk? If your house gets raided by law enforcement, charges for minor copyright infringement should be of absolutely zero concern to you.
- azalemeth 4y ago
  > The "best" format for reading books is epub, as it is an opwn format which does not try to adapt a paper format. There are many free readers available for it. I disagree. ePub assumes that the thing you are reading can easily be reformatted – for mathematics, technical documents, or similar, this is really not true. I've got a few technical books where the publisher released them as either a LaTeX'd pdf or an epub and on my iPad reading the ePub is _awful_ -- the layout is worse, it's very distracting, and the effort that the author put into ideally putting "this equation" and "this text referring to this equation" together has been lost.
  - maweki 4y ago
    I haaaaate recipe books in ePub with a passion. They always look cheap and the images unapetizing and the formatting of the preparation steps never looks good.
  - Tepix 4y ago
    I'm pretty sure it's not EPUB that's at fault. I've seen very attractive EPUB books.
  - constantcrying 4y ago
    Epub pushes the duty of layout onto the reader, it is very similar to a website. With epub you can freely change font, spacing, etc. (great accesibility feature). PDF is a representation of paper. LaTeX files look good as a PDF because LaTeX files are created to be printed or viewed as a PDF. A digital book should not enforce layout. Yes, epub has flaws, especially if it is not seen as the main target for publication.
- qwerty456127 4y ago
  > The "best" format for reading books is epub Not really. Practically, for many pirate ebooks you can find in both ePub and PDF you better choose PDF because it looks and reads like the original while the ePub version probably is almost garbage with broken tables, code quotes etc. As a format FB2 is better than ePub because it separates the content from the view while ePub mixes them heavily. I usually convert ePub to FB2 before reading just to force my PocketBook reader to use its default typesetting instead of that hardcoded in the ePub file. FB2 also is much more convenient to process programmatically and it defines more meaningful metadata than ePub.
  - iggldiggl 4y ago
    > As a format FB2 is better than ePub because it separates the content from the view while ePub mixes them heavily. Problem is that as soon as you need some typographical or layout feature beyond what is natively supported by FB2 you're out of luck. With ePub you still have a chance of manually creating some custom effects before having to give up and fall back to a PDF. Now granted, for your typical run-of-the-mill novel it's usually not a problem, because those rarely do anything non-standard with regards to layouting or typography. However some books do play around with their layouting and/or typography, sometimes quite heavily. House of Leaves e.g. would be impossible to properly reproduce in FB2, and since that particular book goes really overboard in terms of playing around with the page layout, I think even as an ePub it'd be quite a feat to successfully pull it off.
  - constantcrying 4y ago
    >Practically, for many pirate ebooks you can find in both ePub and PDF you better choose PDF because it looks and reads like the original while the ePub version probably is almost garbage with broken tables, code quotes etc. The reverse can be true as well, where the pdf is some badly compiled epub. And with the epub at least you can always read the actual text, without repeated swiping for each line.
- holibops 4y ago
  Yes but even a PDF needs downloading on mobile browsers. Whereas the Books section of the Internet Archive has a consistent format and displays them all in-browser, it's so much more convenient and user-friendly. This archive should aim for the same.
  - UncleEntity 4y ago
    > This archive should aim for the same. This archive of a project where the principal actors are currently awaiting extradition to the US for copyright infringement charges should work on making the user experience better? Think they have bigger fish to fry like making sure the archive of the project survives which, incidentally, is what this is all about.

t-3 4y ago

OK, but without seeders the project will die. If you only want to leech, maybe you should stay away from appeals for participation?

kristofferR 4y ago

Azw3 is main Kindle format, the best viewer apps for them are Calibre or even the official Kindle app. It does have previews for PDFs, better formats aren't easily displayed in a browser.

constantcrying 4y ago

In all likelihood the book you are looking for is available as a .pdf The "best" format for reading books is epub, as it is an opwn format which does not try to adapt a paper format. There are many free readers available for it. >And do I really want evidence of piracy sitting on my hard disk? If your house gets raided by law enforcement, charges for minor copyright infringement should be of absolutely zero concern to you.

azalemeth 4y ago
> The "best" format for reading books is epub, as it is an opwn format which does not try to adapt a paper format. There are many free readers available for it. I disagree. ePub assumes that the thing you are reading can easily be reformatted – for mathematics, technical documents, or similar, this is really not true. I've got a few technical books where the publisher released them as either a LaTeX'd pdf or an epub and on my iPad reading the ePub is _awful_ -- the layout is worse, it's very distracting, and the effort that the author put into ideally putting "this equation" and "this text referring to this equation" together has been lost.
- maweki 4y ago
  I haaaaate recipe books in ePub with a passion. They always look cheap and the images unapetizing and the formatting of the preparation steps never looks good.
- Tepix 4y ago
  I'm pretty sure it's not EPUB that's at fault. I've seen very attractive EPUB books.
- constantcrying 4y ago
  Epub pushes the duty of layout onto the reader, it is very similar to a website. With epub you can freely change font, spacing, etc. (great accesibility feature). PDF is a representation of paper. LaTeX files look good as a PDF because LaTeX files are created to be printed or viewed as a PDF. A digital book should not enforce layout. Yes, epub has flaws, especially if it is not seen as the main target for publication.
qwerty456127 4y ago
> The "best" format for reading books is epub Not really. Practically, for many pirate ebooks you can find in both ePub and PDF you better choose PDF because it looks and reads like the original while the ePub version probably is almost garbage with broken tables, code quotes etc. As a format FB2 is better than ePub because it separates the content from the view while ePub mixes them heavily. I usually convert ePub to FB2 before reading just to force my PocketBook reader to use its default typesetting instead of that hardcoded in the ePub file. FB2 also is much more convenient to process programmatically and it defines more meaningful metadata than ePub.
- iggldiggl 4y ago
  > As a format FB2 is better than ePub because it separates the content from the view while ePub mixes them heavily. Problem is that as soon as you need some typographical or layout feature beyond what is natively supported by FB2 you're out of luck. With ePub you still have a chance of manually creating some custom effects before having to give up and fall back to a PDF. Now granted, for your typical run-of-the-mill novel it's usually not a problem, because those rarely do anything non-standard with regards to layouting or typography. However some books do play around with their layouting and/or typography, sometimes quite heavily. House of Leaves e.g. would be impossible to properly reproduce in FB2, and since that particular book goes really overboard in terms of playing around with the page layout, I think even as an ePub it'd be quite a feat to successfully pull it off.
- constantcrying 4y ago
  >Practically, for many pirate ebooks you can find in both ePub and PDF you better choose PDF because it looks and reads like the original while the ePub version probably is almost garbage with broken tables, code quotes etc. The reverse can be true as well, where the pdf is some badly compiled epub. And with the epub at least you can always read the actual text, without repeated swiping for each line.
holibops 4y ago
Yes but even a PDF needs downloading on mobile browsers. Whereas the Books section of the Internet Archive has a consistent format and displays them all in-browser, it's so much more convenient and user-friendly. This archive should aim for the same.
- UncleEntity 4y ago
  > This archive should aim for the same. This archive of a project where the principal actors are currently awaiting extradition to the US for copyright infringement charges should work on making the user experience better? Think they have bigger fish to fry like making sure the archive of the project survives which, incidentally, is what this is all about.