Pros and Cons of using Kepubs vs ePubs

[kaufman]

I've done a search for this and I can't seem to find anything. Is there a list of the advantages and disadvantages of one format over the other on the Aura HD?

Thanks.

[paola]

Originally Posted by kaufman

I've done a search for this and I can't seem to find anything. Is there a list of the advantages and disadvantages of one format over the other on the Aura HD?

Thanks.

you may want to have a look at the kepub.epub thread. Differences are summarised from this post onwards.

[ShellShock]

Kepubs are displayed with both a top menu and a bottom menu, with epubs only the bottom menu is displayed, therefore you get more lines on the screen with epub. Also you can make your own formatting changes to epub, e.g., to reduce the line-height below the 1.3em minimum that the slider uses.

[93terp]

Originally Posted by ShellShock

Kepubs are displayed with both a top menu and a bottom menu, with epubs only the bottom menu is displayed, therefore you get more lines on the screen with epub. Also you can make your own formatting changes to epub, e.g., to reduce the line-height below the 1.3em minimum that the slider uses.

The other advantage of kepub, IMHO, is that it gives you the reading stats. So when you tap the screen at the bottom, you will see something like "x% read", with a down-pointing arrow. When you tap the arrow, it brings up the reading stats for that book, i.e., how long you have remaining in the current chapter (hours and/or minutes), how long the next chapter is (hours and/or minutes), and estimated time remaining for the whole book, a graphical display of chapters (in a bar graph format), showing chapters read and chapters to be read and their size.

It's not 100% perfect in its estimates, but its a good indicator. The sideloaded epub will not give you this information.

Additionally, you must use a Calibre plugin to have a sideloaded epub converted to kepub if that's your preference. Otherwise, the only way to get kepubs is directly from Kobo.

An advantage for ePub are highlighting and annotations for side-loaded books. KePub only supports highlighting and annotations for books bought from Kobo (as far as I can tell).

[kaufman]

Thanks everyone.

It looks like ePubs might be the way for me as I would generally rather have more text then reading statistics.

[paola]

Originally Posted by BWinmill

An advantage for ePub are highlighting and annotations for side-loaded books. KePub only supports highlighting and annotations for books bought from Kobo (as far as I can tell).

sorry, you may be confusing devices with formats. Epub and Kepub are formats, and you can sideloads both kepub and epub files on a Kobo. The difference is that the device uses two different rendering engines for the two formats.

Having said that, you can highlight an epub as well as a kepub using a Kobo reader (in my experience epub highlights appear slightly darker than kepub, but it could be me). Another advantage of the Kepub over the epub format is that you see a pop-up preview of the footnotes in a book, which you do not in an epub file.

There are many more differences discussed from the second link I put above (including handling of languages, handling of hyperlinks, storing of annotations, etc.).

Loosely speaking, you can get an epub or a kepub from any shop: if you buy directly from kobo, you have two options, either direct sync with your device (if you like the native kepub), or you can download an ADE epub and sideload it on your device if you prefer that format.

If you buy an epub from another provider, you can either sideload it as such, or you can use the Kobo Touch Extended Calibre plugin to send it as a Kepub to your device (you can do so also with any epub downloaded from kobo, though why would you?)

[PeterT]

I think the issue was that some of the functions do not work on ePubs converted by the driver to kEpubs.

From the driver read me

Originally Posted by jgoguen

Known Issues
Not everything works perfectly all the time. Here are some of the issues I know about that are likely to stick around for a while.

• Bookmarks, annotations, highlighting, and anything else that's highly dependent on your current position may work fine, may have slight issues, or may not work very well.
• The hyphenation feature may cause the Kobo device to fail to properly recognize words when you tap and hold a word to search for it in the dictionary. This may manifest as the device only selecting part of a word, in which case you may drag the selection to encompass the entire word as a workaround. It may also manifest as the Kobo saying that "word" could not be found and the closest match is "word".

[paola]

Originally Posted by PeterT

I think the issue was that some of the functions do not work on ePubs converted by the driver to kEpubs.

From the driver read me

absolutely, and I should have been more precise (though so far I've been lucky with my conversions, even if admittedly I have more native Kepubs than converted ones). On the other hand, for books coming from Kobo, which can be either epub or kepub, the differences for me tip the balance to kepubs. But I am admittedly extremely biased in this respect