View Single Post
Old 11-23-2011, 10:09 PM   #6
Serpentine
Evangelist
Serpentine ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Serpentine ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Serpentine ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Serpentine ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Serpentine ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Serpentine ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Serpentine ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Serpentine ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Serpentine ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Serpentine ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Serpentine ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.
 
Posts: 416
Karma: 1045911
Join Date: Sep 2011
Location: Cape Town, South Africa
Device: Kindle 3
Quote:
Originally Posted by fsvum View Post
so why not on an ereader? 6GB is nothing.
It's not really a problem of 'why not' so much of the expectation of performance/problems.
For example you can quite easily process the whole of wikipedia into an epub, however the horrific size of the ToC would make it near impossible to navigate, text search would be soul crushing and you'd run into problems with most reader software running out of memory just trying to hold most of it.

Since epub uses zip, you'd need to make sure that any reader supports ZIP64, allowing for archives > 4gb, since the compressed xml is around 7gb (no images) in its raw form. I expect 50% of readers would choke on just requiring compatibility with large zips.

Apps, since you have software control, allow you to avoid this since you can control memory usage, use custom structures to cope with indexing/searching which fit your usage, compression or markup which is optimal for the format.
Serpentine is offline   Reply With Quote