I hear that. Hard to imagine something more than a PDF when we've had 500+ years of printing press bias and influence from incumbents on how users can/should interact with content. In my own field of work, the scienctific publishing monopoly is especially guilty of this.
Discussion
Yeah. That's why the first edition of #Alexandria is called "Gutenberg". We want to reimagine the printing press.
A PDF is essentially just Postscript images of pages of paper, and publications haven't moved much beyond that. This is something fundamentally different, that can be displayed _as if it were_ a PDF.
But it's designed to be navigated and produced by human and machine curators. That's why NIP-62 is called "Curated Publications", not "books". It looks like a book, but it's high-tech under the hood.