Re:NASA's free history e-book collection
by toomuchtodo on Sunday March 29, 2020 @02:23PM
(#22721280)
Because these PDFs are publicly/freely available, it could be undertaken to convert them to mobi and ePub formats (if one were so inclined). Maybe see if existing free ebook processors [1] [2] would accept these into their pipelines?
Heck, the US gov even has a service to do this for departments who pay for it [3].
[2] https://www.gitenberg.org/updates
[3] https://www.gpo.gov/how-to-work-with-us/agency/services-for-...
I clicked on a book at random, and it had ePub and Mobi formats available for download.
I guess it's just down to whatever format the book is in within their archives.
Re:NASA's free history e-book collection
by WalterBright on Sunday March 29, 2020 @06:00PM
(#22723159)
Some of them, like "Flights of Discovery", are clearly scanned book copies. It takes a lot of manual work to convert a scanned book into an ebook format.
My guess is that opening particular file formats is a much more common problem and PDFs just shine there.
Re:NASA's free history e-book collection
by Ididntdothis on Sunday March 29, 2020 @03:18PM
(#22721759)
Totally agree. Mobi or ePub would be much better for most purposes.
It has so many drawbacks: it's usually unparseable; it's usually unsearchable; incompatible with all sorts of format conversions; its rigid pagination makes it cumbersome to read when not in zoomed-in, especially on mobile; its best features require proprietary software when authoring them, yet most people seem to use generic pdf file export; it's been subject to exploits... and the list goes on.