10-01-2008, 09:50 AM | #1 |
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What is EPUB all about?
Can someone point me to a resource / link that explains the benefits of EPUB versus Sony's lrf format, or otherwise just plain gets me up to speed on these formats. Much obliged.
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10-01-2008, 09:52 AM | #2 | |
Icanhasdonuts?
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Here is a link to the ePUB format part of it: https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/EPUB |
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10-01-2008, 09:56 AM | #3 |
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EPUB is an industry standard and an open standard, while LRF is a proprietary format.
Compared to the other reflowable formats, EPUB is more advanced, supporting CSS stylesheets, SVG images, a real multi-level table of contents etc... But the most important point is that EPUB will be used at an industrial level by the publishing industry and available across a large selection of devices. Currently, it's still early days for the format, and the number of devices/reading systems that support EPUB are limited, but it'll change in the upcoming months. Take a look at our EPUB help page on Feedbooks: http://www.feedbooks.com/help/epub Or at the official specs on the IDPF website: http://idpf.org |
10-02-2008, 01:41 AM | #4 |
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If I may modify the original question a bit: I create all books myself (right from buying the paper book to scan it). Once done, I store them in HTML format. For the purpose of reading them on my Sony Reader, I wrote a series of utilities (which mostly use Calibre to do the dirty job) to convert them. It makes little difference for me whether I convert to LRF or to EPUB.
In this situation, and with today's hardware (I use PRS-505) - does EPUB have any distinct advantage over LRF? I mean, I chose LRF months ago because the reader rendered it a lot faster than PDF or RTF, because it had perfect support for UTF-8 (I use Eastern European charset) etc. Should I switch to EPUB now, what kind of advantages can I expect from it? |
10-02-2008, 02:23 AM | #5 | |
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Files in ePub MUST be in UTF-8 actually, and you can embed the font directly inside the file too. The main advantage is probably the fact that you won't really have to do a lot of format shifting in the upcoming years if you start using ePub rather than LRF. You can also use far more advanced layouts and formatting in ePub thanks to the CSS 2.0 support. |
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10-02-2008, 03:14 AM | #6 | |
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My uncertainty whether to use LRF or EPUB is mostly about "which format is easier for my device's firmware" - speed of rendering, power consumption, stuff like that. Multilevel TOC would be a point in favor of EPUB, as would be CSS2 support, but not if it meant reduced lifetime on battery or prolonged page turns. |
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10-02-2008, 07:30 AM | #7 | |
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BOb |
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10-02-2008, 08:43 AM | #8 |
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Guess I will stay with LRF. I have just converted a book to EPUB using the default settings of HTML2EPUB, and I am quite disappointed. The speed is pretty good, except that the Reader does not parse the whole file at once - instead it "reformats" the book every time I try to follow a link. Apparently only some parts of my CSS file get interpreted (e.g. blockquotes are beautifuly formatted according to my specs while regular paragraphs are not). It seems images are displayed in full size while in LRF generated from the same HTML file the images are resized to fit the screen. But the most serious issue is that in EPUB, certain national characters are not displayed correctly - but they work perfectly in LRF. It may be that HTML2EPUB incorrectly detects encoding (the incorrect characters seem to be those few which are different in Windows-1250 and ISO-8859-2), I don't know. Still, the poor formatting and very poor performance with links seem like a serious problems with the Reader itself.
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10-02-2008, 11:23 AM | #9 | |
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Dale |
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10-02-2008, 11:33 AM | #10 |
When's Doughnut Day?
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Not mentioned yet in the thread but elsewhere, I would add that the firmware that currently runs on the Sony 505 does not display the text from epub files as fully justified - they are only left-justified. And columns of text that would probably appear nicely in a Sony LR* format file appear as a long, run-on sentence in epub format on the Reader. If Sony would fix this, then epub would be an added benefit to 505 owners because it might mean a lot more titles available for their Readers. Until Sony fixes the problem, I find these problems just too annoying and will stick with the Sony format.
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10-02-2008, 11:39 AM | #11 | |
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I did such a list too on my blog: http://blog.feedbooks.com/?p=74
Quote:
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10-02-2008, 12:17 PM | #12 | |
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As for the links, that happens when the epub contains several HTML files (typically because the total content length is > 300K). But yeah DE is very unstable when processing links. I've seen epub files that crash when you click on an intext link and work when you use the same link from the TOC. I expect this will not get better until the next generation of hardware which for SONY at least will hopefully be sometime soon. |
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Tags |
epub, lrf, prs-505, sony |
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