> Does this suggest noncommercial library books will offer research capabilities that commercial ebooks will not?

If they are scanned noncommercial library books, I guess.

I'm not sure how this is really relevant though. Scanning for this use may be fair use (hooray! some sanity), but the publishers aren't providing an ASCII file to the libraries either, the libraries are making a copy...hence the need for a fair use decision.

Are you suggesting that ebooks should be formatted in groff and devoid of page-breaks?

Should be a format that can be grep'd, made into PostScript, DejaVu, etc. Versatile. ASCII works well for that. Open, non-proprietary format.

Not only that, working with raw text is so much faster than anything else. less(1) is the most responsive "ebook reader" I've ever used. It never chokes on huge files. less -n

Ever try reading 100 or more PDF's in one sitting?

But with 100 ASCII docs, it's possible to skim them fast using less, or mine some text with some UNIX utility.

I like what this judge said. Digitizing books not just about putting the book on a "paper-like" screen with beautiful fonts, it's about enabling new utility. Working with the text.

> Should be a format that can be grep'd, made into PostScript, DejaVu, etc. Versatile. ASCII works well for that. Open, non-proprietary format.

Org Mode.

http://orgmode.org/

I'm in for plaintext, but ASCII is ill suited for most languages.

  > It never chokes on huge files

You've never tried to reach the end of a 200MB log file with a cold cache... :P

It can handle files that big no problem. Use the -n switch to supress page numbering.

But with a 200MB file, chances are you will only want to view part of it. Unless you have superhuman reading powers. ;)

Dissect the part you want with some filter (sed, awk, tail, whatever) and feed the result to less.

epub is xhtml+ wrapper

If you're targeting grep as a tool to operate on your data, then HTML isn't the best 'raw' format as grep isn't HTML-aware. It can't ignore markup, or translate encoded values (e.g. & => &).

But ePub as a format is open and well understood, and there are XHTML parsers in every language you might care about.

I thought we were talking about viewing ebooks.

Yes, I don't want page-breaks in my ebooks. My reader is unlikely to be precisely the size the publisher put breaks on.

Technology doesn't make this an either-or situation, and some time reading RFCs really makes the pain of ascii obvious.

Just ask for reflowable pdf. Figures, equations, cross-references (with hyperlinks), actual typography and design, full-text search, and the ability to adapt to your viewer.

If you don't like that implementation, then may I suggest looking into improvements to the algorithm, instead of brutally stripping away content at books to fit an unnecessarily crude model?

I don't understand how PDF could be reflowable.

I'd like a nice ePub, but again, no page-breaks. They'll be wrong for most devices anyway.

Textbooks in pure ASCII sounds like a pain. No hyperlinks? No index?

As plane-Jane as can be sounds absolutely great for text piping etc.

What [major] eBook format keep their content in something other than ASCII (or Unicode or text of some kind)?