06-20-2009, 04:13 AM | #1 |
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Mobipocket vs ePub: Why worse is better in ebook formats
A very good article with implementation overviews of Mobi, MS LIT and ePub formats and an example where an incorrect rendering decision made by the Mobi implementation works better than the 'correct' rendering approach adopted by ePub. Hopefully the ePub implementation team is listening.
http://platypope.org/blog/2009/4/3/w...e-book-formats |
06-20-2009, 04:32 AM | #2 |
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I think the author is nuts. Yes, eReader is not a nice format. But Mobipocket is not better then ePub. As he pointed out, with the Mobile ePub specifications, the issues of having to load in the entire file and render it all at once in memory is a non-issue. The author is just wrong. What he says is so good about Mobipocket is part of why Mobipocket is not so good.
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06-20-2009, 04:35 AM | #3 |
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Interesting article, and I completely agree with the author.
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06-20-2009, 04:41 AM | #4 |
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06-20-2009, 04:45 AM | #5 |
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You are entirely wrong, Jon.
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06-20-2009, 04:46 AM | #6 | |
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Quote:
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06-20-2009, 05:02 AM | #7 |
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ePub is completely impractical for "resource-limited" devices due to the necessity to load the entire XML parse tree into memory. As the author very rightly says, Mobi rendering is "good enough".
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06-20-2009, 05:07 AM | #8 |
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06-20-2009, 05:11 AM | #9 |
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The necessity to load the entire parse tree into memory is a part of the ePub spec. ADE's 300k "flow size" restriction is a result of that requirement.
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06-20-2009, 05:58 AM | #10 |
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No, it's not part of the specs. It's a common way to deal with XML, but you can optimize things or do it a different way.
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06-20-2009, 06:47 AM | #11 |
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Interesting article!
Some sentences could be made clearer for the non-specialist, though. It could also be interesting to add other formats like the Russian fb2 to this analysis. A big question for me (and an interesting test for all those formats) is which format allows the use of these free off-line versions of Wikipedia available in many languages there: http://pinguinburg.de/wpmp Right now they are available in mobipocket format, but most e-reader devices cannot use them because the closed-source mobipocket software reader does not handle links between several files. The open source FBReader cannot do anything with those files for two reasons: - it absolutely wants to load the entire book in memory (imagine a 1 GB Wikipedia file in the memory of one of our favorite devices! - like the official mobipocket software reader, it does not allow links between several files, and those freely downloadable Wikipedia files come in the following form: a zip file decompressed into a directory containing a master index file, and the hundreds of thousands of Wikipedia articles are contained in a few dozen files. Could epub do better? Should the epub standard be rewritten to be able to handle Wikipedia? Could fb2 do it? |
06-20-2009, 07:36 AM | #12 |
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06-20-2009, 07:44 AM | #13 |
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06-20-2009, 10:43 AM | #14 | |
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Great article I completely agree with the author.
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06-20-2009, 10:48 AM | #15 |
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Good discussion. ITA agree that Mobipocket is "good enough". I can still pull out an old Palm and read MobiPocket and eReader books on it. The only way I can use ePub is to convert it and honestly that's how I view the current implementation of ePub. Not really all that usable for me but convertable.
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