It'll be in PDF sooner, and my experience is that PDF >> any other system for ebooks. I liked the idea of EPUB but when I recently installed an EPUB reader to read some files I was shocked at how awful it looked whereas for 15 years I've been reading PDF files on tablets with relish.
Have you ever tried reading a PDF ebook on a phone? Small font size, doesn't fill the entire screen (phones are taller), margins make it appear even smaller... even if you have good eyesight it's a pain. The whole point of PDF is to preserve a page layout as authored. EPUB is meant to adapt to your device.
The worst epubs are bad because some jackass took some poorly OCRed text and dumped it into the format. The best (retail) epubs are on par with the best PDFs except you don't have to pan-and-scan to read a fucking page. It just reflows.
For novels I want and prefer epubs, but also non-novels if they were released in the last 5 years or so. PDF isn't magic, and there are bad pdfs out there too, scans of photo-copied books and other nonsense.
There is a mode for PDF files that reflows and is logically similar to EPUB in that there is an HTML-derived data model and you have images embedded in the PDF much as they are embedded in the EPUB. Of course if you hate how complex PDF is it is more to hate.
I am mostly reading on a tablet, not a phone. I think if you are reading on a phone you are already screwed —- if people are “reading” on phones I think 80% of it is that you just read less.
That’s a pretty judgemental statement out of nowhere - and completely ignored the ebook readers part, which are devices literally created for this purpose.
As for phones, screens nowadays are almost the same size as readers and with more resolution. E-ink is more comfortable for longer sessions, but if you find such a size unusable you might just have poor eyesight.
As someone who is super nearsighted, the smaller screen on a phone is great for reading, especially in contexts like bedtime reading where I want to have my glasses off.
I have read many hundreds of books this way.
The problem with a tablet is that most tablets, especially the sort that are good for seeing entire as-printed pages at once, are too big for me to keep the entire screen in focus without wearing glasses. (with that said, foldables improve things here, since the aspect ratio bottleneck is typically width so being able to double the width on the fly makes such things more readable.
That's interesting, I absolutely hate PDF. Lack of metadata for collecting, format is difficult to support, doesn't layout well on mobile, and very limited customization (like dark mode, changing text size, etc).
Only benefit is browsers have built-in support for the format.
One thing I like about PDF is the annotations (notes & highlights) are embedded in the PDF itself. That is not the case for EPUB files, each EPUB reader stores annotations in its own proprietary format.
Very true, I just rolled out annotations for Kavita (a self-hosted book/comic server) and epub doesn't have the ability to store it in the file (although Kavita has a no-modification policy).
Although for cases like Kavita, storing in the file would be problematic if multiple users want their own annotations without concerns of data leaking.
PDFs have pretty excellent support for metadata. If the collection software doesn't support at least Dublin Core, that may be kind of their own fault...
I haven't seen this in the real world or the tooling to back it up. Currently, Calibre is the only software that writes metadata that pulls from online sources.
I'm sure Adobe Acrobat also supports, but that's not used in the scene.
Feels like a very big gap in the OSS world then. The PDF spec supports multiple standards for metadata, Acrobat has workflows for all of them, and Adobe sells into a bunch of verticals (such as public libraries) that rely on this functionality heavily.
The bond deal he made to pay for Harvard's Allston campus expansion blew up in the crash and nearly bankrupted the university. It takes a special kind of genius to bankrupt Harvard.
It's a little bit of irony that the example of the author points to architects relying on a CAD system, a system that was presumably built by programmers. Who had to understand that the results their software produced had to have a high level of reliability--if it produced a wrong result, buildings could collapse, people could be hurt or killed. Errors would be extremely costly. So it's not impossible, just most software isn't held to that standard, because there's less incentive.
See it seems exceptionally short-sighted to me to continue the race to pull as much carbon out of the atmosphere as possible and put it in the air, but what do I know?
> Global solar installations are breaking records again in 2025. In H1 2025, the world added 380 gigawatts (GW) of new solar capacity – a staggering 64% jump compared to the same period in 2024, when 232 GW came online. China was responsible for installing a massive 256 GW of that solar capacity.
> For context, it took until September last year to pass the 350 GW mark. This year, the milestone was achieved in June. That pace cements solar as the fastest-growing source of new electricity generation worldwide. In 2024, global solar output rose by 28% (+469 terawatt-hours) from 2023, more growth than any other energy source.
> Nicolas Fulghum, senior energy analyst at independent energy think tank Ember, said, “These latest numbers on solar deployment in 2025 defy gravity, with annual solar installations continuing their sharp rise. In a world of volatile energy markets, solar offers domestically produced power that can be rolled out at record speed to meet growing demand, independent of global fossil fuel supply chains.”
> Utility-scale solar power capacity in China reached more than 880 gigawatts (GW) in 2024, according to China’s National Energy Administration. China has more utility-scale solar than any other country. The 277 GW of utility-scale solar capacity installed in China in 2024 alone is more than twice as much as the 121 GW of utility-scale solar capacity installed in the United States at the end of 2024.
> Planned solar capacity projects will likely lead to continued growth in China’s solar capacity. More than 720 GW of solar capacity are in development: about 250 GW under construction, nearly 300 GW in pre-construction phases, and 177 GW of announced projects, according to the Global Solar Power Tracker compiled by Global Energy Monitor.
(1GW of solar PV is installed every 15 hours globally as of this comment; 4.6TW of new renewables are expected to come online globally in the next four years)
Added to the 45% direct fossil fuel usage... for 68% or so from fossil fuels.
Not counting the fossil fuels used to mine in other nations (likely diesel) the lithium and other elements, or transportation of materials (likely deisel) or the transportation of the final goods (likely deisel).
> 80% of the world lives in fossil fuel importing countries, with over 50 countries importing more than half their primary energy as fossil fuels. In contrast, 92% of countries have renewables potential over ten times their current demand. Replacing imported fossil fuels using three key levers—EVs, heat pumps and renewables—can cut net fossil fuel imports by 70%, saving $1.3 trillion globally each year. Once electrotech is bought, it lasts for decades, providing insulation from the vagaries of global pricing. When fossil flows stop, the economy stops. When electrotech flows stop, only growth is at risk.
> China’s pivot to electrotech has been central to the global shift, sparking an explosion in manufacturing, innovation and deployment. China’s domestic roll-out of electrotech is unparalleled: it accounts for half of global solar panel installations, 60% of EV sales and two-thirds of global growth in electricity demand since 2019. In the first half of 2025, Chinese fossil demand in electricity generation was down by 2%. This is highly significant because global fossil fuel demand excluding China has been flat since 2018, and China has driven all the net growth.
> As electrotech surges into one country and sector after the next, it drives replacement, not addition. Fossil demand has been flat for industrial energy since 2014, for buildings since 2018, for road transport since 2019, and may peak for electricity this year. Two-thirds of countries have already seen peak fossil demand in end-use sectors, and half the world has seen a peak in fossil fuels for electricity. China is the pivot nation in the global system, and fossil electricity demand in China is down 2% in the first half of 2025. If current trends continue in renewables deployment and electrification, fossil fuel demand will be in decline by 2030. That implies disruption for the fossil fuel sector and the rise of new electrotech winners.
It's a planned trajectory, China went hard on using fossil fuels to develop renewable power + 20% nuclear in order to replace their fossil fuel dependancy (which is coming).
Even their recent coal usage has been 'better' in the sense of closing down large numbers of smaller older inefficient and extremely dirty coal plants while building out a lesser number of larger, moder, more efficient, less dirty coal.
On the mining side they are partnered with suppliers like Fortescue Metals that has been making massive real investments in hydrogen, regenertive trains, water management, etc. at a scale of moving a billion tonnes of material per annum.
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