ePub vs Mobi, I don't get it

[nyrath]

Originally Posted by captkjaneway

To be honest isn't it true of any emerging/establishing technology that there will always be 2 main formats that seem to fight til the death.....VHS v Betamax, HDDVD v BluRay. With the wealth of options available to convert books/documents if it is not obtainable in your chosen format I don't really see the ire.

Occasionally there are three main formats that fight.

You see, in major industries, they all want standards. Trouble is, each individual company wants their particular format to become the standard, and then things turn ugly.

[kovidgoyal]

Originally Posted by PhishStyx

After I downloaded Sigil because I was interested in producing game e-books, I noticed that there is very little table support and when I asked about tables, I was told quite specifically (in the Sigil forum here) that ePub tables do NOT reflow well. So I abandoned the idea and have continued with PDF's.

Tables do not reflow. If you think about it a little, that is natural. A table is not a semantic structure, its is basicallya set of instructions saying put this object here, this object to its right and this object below it. That kind of instructionset is hard to reflow.

If you are interested in reflowable design, you should look for CSS based replacements for tables. There are plenty of articles/blog posts about it. Most of them are focussed on web design, but the techniques apply equally well to ePUB.

[Tom Wood]

At Wikipedia, there is this comment regarding EPUB:

Criticism

One criticism of EPUB is that, while good for text-centric books, it may be unsuitable for publications which require precise layout or specialized formatting, such as a comic book.

Why would that be? The support for SVG is nice for vector images, but then they say it won't work well for comics, which is an area of interest to me.

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

No what you'd ideally like is hanging indents so that when the screen is resized to a width smaller than a single line the line reflows and the start of a line can be distinguished from the reflowed part.

Originally Posted by pdurrant

What neither Mobipocket nor ePub can do is have lines of poetry be left-aligned, but any excess be right-aligned on the next line.

Actually, Mobipocket has that exactly (see bottom part here). But last time I tried the Cybook didn't support this, I don't know if the Kindle does.

[Sweetpea]

Hmm, maybe I should try it out... (I'll need to pry away the Kindle from my husband's hands somehow... but I can try!)

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by Jellby

Actually, Mobipocket has that exactly (see bottom part here). But last time I tried the Cybook didn't support this, I don't know if the Kindle does.

Goodness me. So it does.

Unfortunately it doesn't work on the Kindle Previewer or on a Kindle 2i. It does work on Mobipocket Reader under Windows. And it does work on Kindle for Mac and Kindle for PC.

I found out something else interesting. On the Kindle, specifying font size as -1 or +1 is exactly equivalent to specifying it as 2 or 4. By this I mean that if a paragraph has a base font size of 5, specify a span in that paragraph as having font size -1 will make the Kindle display text of size 2, not text of size 4. In the Mobipocket reader, you (correctly) get text of size 4 displayed.

Arghh... no wonder I've been having so much difficulty. Amazon bought Mobipocket, and have created a renderer that does match the old Mobipocket renderer, but in ways that make things worse, not better. They've stripped out clever features like poetry alignment, and have broken existing features (like relative font sizes).

And yes, again it's true that the Kindle Previewer and Kindle 2i have this rendering mistake, but Kindle for Mac and Kindle for PC render the relative font sizes correctly!

[UPDATE: Added a sample mobipocket/kindle file (generated with KindleGen 1.1) that's just a paragraph of text:

<p>Ordinary size text <font size="+3">Very Big text <font size="-2">Should still be bigger than ordinary text</font></font> Back to ordinary text.</p>

which shows the problem very well. Read it on any Mobipocket reader (including Kindle for Mac and Kindle for PC!) except an actual Kindle or the Kindle Previewer, and you get ordinary text, very big text, slightly big text and ordinary text. Read it on a Kindle, and you get ordinary text, very big text, quite small text and ordinary text! ]

[Update 2: Oh, and here's screen shots from Kindle Previewer and Kindle for Mac, showing the different renderings.]

[Jellby]

By the way, I reported this to the ePUB working group some time (almost a year) ago.

[elsussman]

the reason for this is in the modern business world greed is the standard. Back years ago when Phillips NV invented the cassette tape they were willing to forego the patent rights if the music industry accepted it as the standard and voila. Of course that format has been superceded by other recording methods(CDs etc) but I am afraid we will not see that kind of corporate charity again

[kjk]

Originally Posted by Tom Wood

At Wikipedia, there is this comment regarding EPUB:



Why would that be? The support for SVG is nice for vector images, but then they say it won't work well for comics, which is an area of interest to me.

I think some comic aficionados believe the original page composition/layout is an integral part of the experience...ePub's non-fixed, flexible display approach isn't necessarily conducive to that.

[murraypaul]

Originally Posted by kjk

I think some comic aficionados believe the original page composition/layout is an integral part of the experience...ePub's non-fixed, flexible display approach isn't necessarily conducive to that.

Um, well the layout is an integral part, no ifs or buts.
Comics are designed around pages, either single or double page spreads.
The art is designed around that exact size, and the page needs to be viewed as a whole. Modern comics do not tend to sit inside a regular arrangement of individual panels which can be shuffled around.
I think the issues around using a general purpose format would be things like margins, automatic headers and footers and so on, none of which are desirable when viewing what is basically a series of full screen images.

[Terisa de morgan]

I think I'm a bit biased. I don't care about a format, I don't care about possibilities, I care about nowadays and my reading experience. With the current implementations for format viewers, I like more the Mobipocket flavor than ePub. I like my dictionaries, so I want to be able to carry my dictionaries from a device to other one. I like bookmarks, I don't know how much ePub viewer use bookmarks. So, perhaps the format is the eighth wonder in the world. If the software which has to handle is worse than other which handles a less powerful format, sorry, come back to my door with that format when the software has been improved.

[Tom Wood]

Originally Posted by kjk

I think some comic aficionados believe the original page composition/layout is an integral part of the experience...ePub's non-fixed, flexible display approach isn't necessarily conducive to that.

Originally Posted by murraypaul

Um, well the layout is an integral part, no ifs or buts.
Comics are designed around pages, either single or double page spreads.
The art is designed around that exact size, and the page needs to be viewed as a whole. Modern comics do not tend to sit inside a regular arrangement of individual panels which can be shuffled around.
I think the issues around using a general purpose format would be things like margins, automatic headers and footers and so on, none of which are desirable when viewing what is basically a series of full screen images.

I see the problem when adapting existing comics, but I'm intending to reformat my little webcomic to specifically fit the Kindle screen format. So it would be a series of fullscreen images like you say.

There's a tutorial for optimizing images for the Kindle here:

http://www.robotcomics.net/2009/07/a...-doc-tutorial/

The process and results ain't too pretty. That's for bitmap images. Really need SVG support for this to work well across devices.

[Kali Yuga]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

....In MOBI it's impossible to have text and images side by side. (etc)

I'm currently reading a book on Japanese poetry. Not really noticing any formatting problems at all. The New Yorker has a poetry section which also formats fine in its Kindle edition (which I assume is MOBI).

I've read numerous books with lots of charts and tables, one with so many it drove me up a wall.

I've read several books with illustrations. Lack of text flow isn't bugging me at all, especially on a smaller Kindle screen.

MOBI may not be perfect. However, when Amazon was running its pilot programs for college textbook use, the complaints focused on issues with annotation -- not format. Most of the issues that really rotate my crank relate to editing and proofreading issues.

(And let's not forget Topaz. For better or worse, it addresses some issues like embedded fonts. Clearly Amazon is more interested in developing its own formats over adopting an open standard.)

Thus, as I said, so far as a non-programmer and non-editor, I'm not seeing issues that I can cogently attribute to limitations of the format.

[kovidgoyal]

@Kali Yuga: You're like the horse carriage user in the early 20th century who refuses to see the virtues of cars because the only cars you had ever seen went no faster than horses.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by Kali Yuga

Thus, as I said, so far as a non-programmer and non-editor, I'm not seeing issues that I can cogently attribute to limitations of the format.

Hardly surprising, if you're only reading Mobipocket/Kindle ebooks!

Drop Caps. Inset illustrations. Right indents. Hanging indents that scale with font size. Combinations of indents.

Mobipocket is quite limiting for the book designer, and even worse, Amazon don't render Kindle/Mobipocket files consistently between their various Kindle platforms.