Why aren't more books offered as Markdown downloads?

Question

Given the rise of Markdown for personal notes and technical documentation, I'm wondering why more books aren't offered for download in Markdown format. Personally, I would pay a premium to be able to download a book or textbook as Markdown that I could then easily add to an Obsidian vault or other text-based note software.I could see one reason being that it would make them harder to protect with digital copyright protection, but plenty of textbooks or books are already offered as PDF (protected or non-protected). A similar copyright protection could be added to a text file such as Markdown. Another reason could be that a 10+ mb Markdown file feels unwieldy, but it would be easy to lower the filesize by separating the book into a multiple .md files by chapter. For example, I recently bought a 300-page PDF Kaplan textbook for a financial exam I'm studying to take. I would have much rather purchased a set of Markdown files that I could easily add to note taking software. Is the overall demand for this format too low to justify the support?

devonnull · Accepted Answer

I'd say that the overall demand is too low. Plus, aside from self published books, I'm not sure how many publishing houses (of any size) use/support Markdown as a format for their authors.

codingdave · Answer

Markdown is useful for editing, but completely irrelevant to reading. So there simply is no demand for such things. It also greatly limits formatting options compared to the editors that authors and publishers already have, so they would be adding restrictions to their own work by pursuing Markdown.In general, Markdown's use case is for easy editing of basic formatting in simple documents. Perfect for notes and small bits of documentation. Not perfect for many other things.

talldayo · Answer

PDF and Epub support a featureset that far exceeds Markdown in it's basic specification. Translating from one to the other would be pretty lossy, but possible.You could probably use Pandoc to do this yourself, but again I'd stress that Markdown is really not meant for rendering PDF or Epub content: https://pandoc.org/

paulcole · Answer

> Given the rise of Markdown for personal notes and technical documentationThis is your problem. You&rsquo;re thinking a mole hill is a mountain. Tech dorks liking markdown doesn&rsquo;t mean much.