[jackm8]

I'm finding that I'm relying more and more on them compared to other sources. Project Gutenberg, Standard Ebooks.... They don't go with reflowable text, they just offer scans of original books in as high quality as possible. They do offer epubs, in some cases, but they're often poorly formatted. There's flawed ocr, and no custom proofreading, then again, none of that is needed. Proofreading is often a must, and a problem on epubs. Corrupted pages, ink splats, or just ocr that misbehaved, all that can cause text errors that then drag across various commercial or free ebooks for years. In a scanned page, mistakes are plainly visible, so the reader can see and often deduce what the word that's corrupted was.

Then there's another benefit. Illustrations. You rarely see them even in commercial ebooks. And when they are available, they're often of low quality. On archive.org, you can choose from various editions, compare which looks the best and go with it.

There is size and availability concern, though. Some books can't be downloaded, and when they are files tend to be quite big. Massive compared to epubs. Likewise, pdfs can be of worse quality than processed jpegs, so I often download them instead and convert them into pdfs on my own.