If I was going to offer an ebook, what format would you require? What might you be able to use even if it ain’t ideal? Quick replies appreciated; I’m looking at maybe putting something up for halloween…
additional question – if the delivery format was a compression file, what’s the most broadly used one? zip? rar? i’ve been in a tech coma for a minute.
John Moralessays
Zip is the most backward-compatible, but many formats use compression by default; EPUB, MOBI, CHM, DJVU are inherently compressed formats. So those won’t compress more.
PDFs are not compressed by default, but can be zipped etc.
i didn’t wanna zip for compression, just to bundle the story in different file formats so I can give everybody all of them and they can choose the one that works on their shit.
John Moralessays
Compression is pointless for one work. This is the second quarter of C21.
Plaintext might be… a megabyte or two? Trivial for these days.
—
You could do worse than check out the options Project Gutenberg offers:
That’s the English translation of War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy and contains 587,287 words.
For that, notice the Plain Text UTF-8 is 3.2 MB, whereas the EPUB is 1.8 and the MOBI (Kindle native format) is 2.5.
(Not even one photograph’s worth, these days — and they’re only a thousand words)
John Moralessays
Oh, right. I missed your point 😐
ZIP software can bundle files without compressing them, forming a collection.
In that format, it’s called storing rather than deflating, which is the compression method.
So, yes, a bundle is easy enough. Compression isn’t Zip’s only function.
PDF isn’t really an ebook format. And it’s a lot more work to do properly than any other format – although if you did produce one, you could use it for a print-on-demand book, which is what it’s really good for.
ePub is the only format required for anyone with an e-reader.
A Kindle format? Not needed. Amazon’s Send To Kindle service accepts ePubs, and Amazon does the conversion to the appropriate Kindle format. (NB There are three common Kindle formats: MOBI, AZW3, KFX8. It’s much better to allow Amazon to choose the appropriate format for the Kindle the book is being sent to.)
And all the ebooks distributions services (e.g. SmashWords) will only accept ePub.
beholdersays
Epub is good. HTML also renders well enough on my e-reader. HTML rendered in a lightweight browser like Midori or Konqueror is my preference when I’m reading on a laptop.
kinda feelin like i could potentially get away with just using epub?
altho last i heard, getting epub to your kindle was harder than it should be, for average joes.
Any. cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calibre_(software)
leanin toward just epub and pdf. meeeybe azw but i dunno if there’s weird hidden terms given it uses amazon drm.
thx for the link bud
additional question – if the delivery format was a compression file, what’s the most broadly used one? zip? rar? i’ve been in a tech coma for a minute.
Zip is the most backward-compatible, but many formats use compression by default; EPUB, MOBI, CHM, DJVU are inherently compressed formats. So those won’t compress more.
PDFs are not compressed by default, but can be zipped etc.
Oh, and Amazon’s AZW is DRM-wrapped MOBI.
i didn’t wanna zip for compression, just to bundle the story in different file formats so I can give everybody all of them and they can choose the one that works on their shit.
Compression is pointless for one work. This is the second quarter of C21.
Plaintext might be… a megabyte or two? Trivial for these days.
—
You could do worse than check out the options Project Gutenberg offers:
e.g. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2600
That’s the English translation of War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy and contains 587,287 words.
For that, notice the Plain Text UTF-8 is 3.2 MB, whereas the EPUB is 1.8 and the MOBI (Kindle native format) is 2.5.
(Not even one photograph’s worth, these days — and they’re only a thousand words)
Oh, right. I missed your point 😐
ZIP software can bundle files without compressing them, forming a collection.
In that format, it’s called storing rather than deflating, which is the compression method.
So, yes, a bundle is easy enough. Compression isn’t Zip’s only function.
PDF isn’t really an ebook format. And it’s a lot more work to do properly than any other format – although if you did produce one, you could use it for a print-on-demand book, which is what it’s really good for.
ePub is the only format required for anyone with an e-reader.
A Kindle format? Not needed. Amazon’s Send To Kindle service accepts ePubs, and Amazon does the conversion to the appropriate Kindle format. (NB There are three common Kindle formats: MOBI, AZW3, KFX8. It’s much better to allow Amazon to choose the appropriate format for the Kindle the book is being sent to.)
And all the ebooks distributions services (e.g. SmashWords) will only accept ePub.
Epub is good. HTML also renders well enough on my e-reader. HTML rendered in a lightweight browser like Midori or Konqueror is my preference when I’m reading on a laptop.
kinda feelin like i could potentially get away with just using epub?
altho last i heard, getting epub to your kindle was harder than it should be, for average joes.