EBOOK FORMATS; POPULAR ONES

Dear Readers,

In our preceding article on Ebook, which you may refresh your memory by clicking at the title of this article.

With the recent collapse of the world's largest high street book chains Penguin USA, resulted to the dramatic industry shifts to Ebook program. As such, we foresee this offer a great opportunity for Ebook.


Our discussion today will be specifically on Ebook formats. We decided to focus our discussion on the four most popular Ebook formats as we find that trying to get into every possible format is not practical and effective.


Before we proceed further, let us touch a little bit of its history. Ebooks have already been in existence for a while. In its early days, people tried numerous means of publishing Ebooks, this includes bundling text files into an EXE file. These Ebooks typically ran on an application similar to an internet browser where readers click on the buttons of forwards and backwards to navigate them through the book.


However, downloading of such EXE files poses a significant adverse security risk to the users' computers. As a result, this format lost its popularity speedily especially when people realised the EXE files' risks and exposure to computer viruses. Better formats were then developed without much surprise in just a matter of time.


After some research, we have decided to employ the following four principal formats for our future ebooks:-

1) Kindle Format (AZW)


2) Portable Document Format (PDF)


3) Mobipocket Format (MOBI, PRC)


4) Epub Format (EPUB)

We shall take a brief on these formats before we look at the comparison table, that reflect on how these formats correlate to the most popular Ebook reading devices for our better understanding.


1) Amazon’s Kindle Format (AZW)


It is Amazon’s proprietary Ebook format based on the Mobipocket format, when Amazon bought it in 2005, with a different serial number scheme. Books sold in the Kindle Store then are delivered in this format and carried the extension .azw


2) Portable Document Format (PDF)


Adobe Systems created this PDF in 1993 as a standard format for document exchange. It was basically an image of the original document when a document was converted to PDF. One of its great benefits is that almost all computing devices have the capability to read PDFs and it has been widely accepted as one of the preferred methods of providing documents on the Internet today.


However, we began to carry around smaller devices with technology advancement. First it was laptops and then smaller devices such as Palm, Blackberries, and Iphones.


3) Mobipocket (MOBI, PRC)


Its format uses XHTML and also known as the Open Ebook standard. Mobipocket books not only can be read on the Amazon Kindle, but also several other devices that support this format that include Mobipocket Reader, a free application from Mobipocket. Its files have the extensions .mobi and .prc. This format is particularly useful especially when you need to convert a document from other formats into a format that are readable on Kindle.

4) Epub Format (EPUB)


Its name derived from the meaning of “electronic publication”. Epub is a free and also open standard for formatting ebooks.in September 2007 after it became an official standard of the International Digital Publishing Forum, superseding the Open Ebook standard. It is widely used by majority ebook stroes, with the exception of Amazon Kindle Store as menioned in point 1 above.


Ebooks in this format, with the extension .epub, are read able on most Ebook readers such as the Barnes & Noble Nook, Kobo Reader, Sony Reader, Apple iOS and Android devices.


Sad to say that Kindle users currently are not able to read ebooks in the ePub format. To make it readable, they need to convert the Ebook from ePub format to mobi format which the Kindle can read.


We hope the above discussion has somewhere give you an insight of the Ebook publishing. One interesting point to note is that now some PDF documents can also be re-flowed to fit into smaller screens.



Trust the above discussion had somewhat enlightened you to the publishing industry and we hope you can make use of it for your advancement, with an ultimate objective to lift you up in whatever endavour you undertake.

We will also write other relevant articles on Ebook so as to be more complete on this topic of our discussion.

Seeing you again and your continuous support is always greatly appreciated.






Your Chief Servant,




James Oh