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I do not like PDF because of the large file size associated with it (PDF files are a bunch of images right?)
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The answer is "it depends": PDF is a very flexible file format.
If you took, say, a word document and created a PDF from it using one of the many PDF printer drivers out there, then the answer is no. The PDF file actually contains the text of your document and the instructions a PDF reader needs to reconstruct the formatting of the page. Sometimes you read about programs that can convert PDFs back to text; they work by extracting the text portion of the file.
Now the Sony Libre had a PDF convertor that did convert a PDF file to a bunch of images, because the Libre itself did not have a native PDF reader. But that was not a limitation of the PDF format, but of the Libre.
If the author of the PDF file is smart he can create a 'tagged' PDF file, which allows the text to be reformatted on the fly (or 'reflow' as they call it). Except for a few commercial fiction books, I've never seen this used.
In my case I do have PDF files that are all images; scans of old magazines and paperbacks with damaged binding that I wanted to keep, but didn't want to spend the time and effort to do OCR on them. I'm bullish on PDF for this type of application, but for books which are just straight up text I'm HTML all the way just for reasons of file size, accessibility, and ease of conversion to other formats if necessary.