I don't know, I really love a well-typeset books/papers. Especially when they feature figures that are deliberately placed close to the relevant section in the text, it's just not something we can replicate with HTML, that can barely do proper justified text.
Sure, I would like that beautifully designed page to magically become a single column beautiful document on my phone, but I will take the former over a badly designed text extract where the relevant figure is 10 pages away.
Epub (=html) is good for novels, but there is nothing replacing PDF for science papers. If anything, the latex (or ideally typst) source would come the closest, if properly written (not absolute offsets). That could be used to produce different page sized versions.
The "figures that are deliberately placed close to the relevant section in the text" is something I've heard often, and I'd agree to an extent. But the figure is never 10 pages away (unless you have a tiny screen or something). It's easy to put an image inbetween 2 paragraphs. With PDF papers 1 figure is often referenced in several places throughout the paper so I just open 2 windows with the paper anyway.
For justified text - what's the point of stretching each line artificially just so they align at the end? It looks awful to me even when done "correctly". Having uneven spaces makes it harder to read. Having every line align on the right also makes it harder to read. When you have uneven lines, I subconsciously use the different at the end as an anchor for where I am in the text or where a certain phrase was. Hyphenating words is another thing that doesn't make a lot of sense nowadays - we have enough words with a hyphen naturally in them, so reading a broken up word is mentally taxing as I have to figure out if it's a normal word with a hyphen or a broken up one.
All the arXiv HTML papers are much better to read in the browser, IMO. And they'll only get better. PDF will likely stay the same.
For small screens like phones or tablets, having to constantly scroll up and down and left and right for a 2-column paper is just painful. PDF is much better on a big screen.
Just look at examples like this: https://www.google.de/books/edition/Exploration_Map_by_Map/s...
You will realize that saying "PDFs should be only for printing" is a vast oversimplifcation for the requirements people have for different kinds of documents.
I get "Keine Leseprobe verfügbar" which is "no sample available" according to DDG.
I'm downloading a 101 MB EPUB from Anna’s Archive. I'm not sure if it's an official EPUB or someone converted it from something else. There's no PDF available there. In a few hours I'll try to report how several readers handled it.
It's also on amazon https://www.amazon.com/Exploration-Map-Migrations-Encounters...
There is a kindle version (which would be closer to epub than pdf) but it just is even worse than a pdf and the authors also include the reason for that:
> Due to the complex integration of images and text, this DK eBook has been formatted to retain the design of the print edition. As a result, all elements are fixed in place, but can easily be enlarged by using the pinch-to-zoom function.
EPUB is simply not ready for complex layouts.