Quote:
Originally Posted by Dave_S
A really good place to start to learn about ebook formats is the Wiki right here on MobileRead:
https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/E-book_formats
You can click on any format in the list to see more detailed information about the different ebook formats.
What you mention in your question only deals with the end results of using a particular format and not on how those results are achieved. Many formats are closed standards, so that any third party reader programs need to reverse engineer the format in order to display the text on the screen. A prime example of this seems to be all the trouble trouble people have with the Microsoft LIT format. Formats like EPUB and FB2 are open standards that any reader program developer can access the standards to learn how to make the best display possible of the format. EPUB is is a very rich formatting system with a lot of power in creating complex documents. The disadvantage of EPUB comes when DRM is used, because currently only one relatively primitive software from Adobe can read a DRM EPUB document, so the end user has very little control of how the book is displayed. FB2 is also an open standard, but has no DRM capability. Yet. FB2 is not as powerful as EPUB for complex documents but is superb at rendering documents like fiction novels. I think that FB2 is relatively similar to RTF as far as Reader experience is concerned, but FB2 is a much clearer and more compact format for working with the book creation.
As far as a user with the concerns you have mentioned, it probably comes down more to the ebook reader software available to render the format than the format itself.
Readers like FBReader and CoolReader can read both FB2 and non DRM EPUB documents, and they give the reader a lot of choices for the user to determine how the book will be displayed including nearly unlimited fonts and font sizes. However, since FB2 does not support DRM, not many western publishers release books in that format, so you have to convert another format to that format to use it. The Adobe reader is very limited in that respect, but it does have text to speech capability, which I do not think any current FB2 readers have.
I am sure that this is all as clear as mud, but if if you want to delve into the details of how the different formats are built then the MobilRead Wiki is a good place to start. |
Thanks for replying.
But let me reiterate---I am very familiar with the capabilities of the formats, and the programmer aspects of what is done to present the book.
I am interested in WHY a person PREFERS one format over another, end-user-wise. I guess this stems from the fact that I am not a picky person when it comes to these kind of detail, and I am curious as to WHY other people like one format over another. It doesn't matter to me whether the paragraphs are indented or an extra line between. It doesn't matter what font is used, though I do prefer san serif. What is it about the presentation of the different formats that causes people to prefer one over the other.
Or am I totally off base here?
Just curious.....
AJ
