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Ebooks

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Ebooks (sometimes eBooks or e-Books), as its name implies, are digital text based documents or works that serve as an electronic alternative to traditional, physically printed publications. Typically, they are optimized for Ebook readers but there are plenty of desktop and mobile applications that can read them.

History

Formats

IDPF

International Digital Publishing Forum is an organization created to standardize electronic publication and foster global adoption of an open, accessible, interoperable digital publishing ecosystem. This relieves the stress of publishers that want to release an ebook having to figure out which format to use and which reader to support. IDPF along with its file formats have since been absorbed into W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) which manages web technologies and standards such as HTML, XHTML, CSS, Javascript, XML, WebRTC, WebGPU, Wasm, and more.

OEB
Open eBook
OEBPS
Open eBook Publication Structure

ePUB

An open format for eBooks. Preferred format for many.

  • EPUB / EPUB 2 - OEBPS 2.0 was renamed EPUB as it varied greatly from the previous format. So EPUB and EPUB 2.0 are the same thing.
  • EPUB3 - Comes with many modern changes over 2.0. It now has HTML 5 and CSS 3 support. It attempts to move away completely from XML. Bookmarks now use XHTML instead of XML in the .ncx file.

Derivatives

  • Kepub
  • AZW3

Comic Book Archives

Comic Book Archives technically aren't formats on their own. It describes a loose family of file formats which are ultimately just a collection of images in the usual image formats like PNG or JPG and commonly an optional XML file for metadata compressed into a single archive. The last character changes and it denotes which compression archive it uses. Comic Book Archives are the preferred format for many comic book, manga, bandes dessinees, manhwa, and manhua enthusiasts.

.cbz
Comic Book Archive compressed into ZIP. The most common comic archive.
.cbr
Comic Book Archive compressed into RAR.
.cbt
Comic Book Archive compressed into TAR.
.cb7
Comic Book Archive compressed into 7z.
.cba
Comic Book Archive compressed into ACE.

Kindle Family

Due to the popularity of Amazon, Kindle ereaders, Kindle store, Kindle Unlimited, Audible, Goodreads and more, Amazon has a firm grasp over the ecosystem of book readers. They prefer using their own format which is usually based on an existing format to lock users in as well as keeping out competitors. Despite the fact that they own Comixology, Kindle remains pretty much the last modern reader without support for Comic Book Archives.

  • AZW - Based on MOBI. Has been deprecated in favor of AZW3 and AZW4.
  • AZW2
  • AZW3 - Based on ePUB.
  • AZW4 - Based on PDF. Primarily used for textbooks.

Other

  • PDF -
  • DjVu - A forgotten PDF competitor made by Léon Bottou and others such as Yann LeCun, L Patrick Haffner, Paul G. Howard, Patrice Simard, and Yoshua Bengio at AT&T Bell Labs in the mid-1990s. Never really took off but does have a decent following within the FOSS community. Has a free, GPL'd implementation called DjVuLibre created and still maintained by Léon Bottou himself. The Intellectual Property of the original format is dormant bouncing around various software companies and hasn't been developed on since it left Bell Laboratories.
  • Mobi
  • LRF - Sony was the first to the market when it comes to an ereader using e-ink and was successful. Many old ebooks can be found using this format.

Fiction Book

FictionBook is a format that is pretty much non-existent outside of Russia. Very hard to track any development related to it. It's very similar to EPUB except for the fact that its text is based on XML instead just using it for metadata.

  • fb2 - An open format created in the late 2000s for the Russian market.
  • fb3 - A fb2 successor that supposedly exists. Even Calibre struggles with finding documentation, standards, and specifications related to it.

Software

All-in-one

  • Calibre - Calibre is probably the best and most versatile tool for everything ebook related. Created back in the mid-2000s by kovidgoyal(His Github) who frequents the MobileRead forums and also happens to be the creator of the Kitty terminal emulator. Right when you open it, you'll see a collection browser that displays your personal library of ebooks and allows you to manage and making changes them such as having metadata fetched from the Internet. It also has a small webserver that you can enable and host in order to share or backup your library. It can interact with your e-book reader device that you plug in through USB. It has its own simple desktop eBook reader. It has an XHTML and XML editor so you can edit and make changes to an ebook. It can download news from online newspapers and turn it into e-books for convenient reading. It also has many python-based plugins that adds much more functionality.
    • DeDRM tools - An almost essential plugin for removing DRM.

Server

  • Lazy Librarian - SickBeard and CouchPotato like application written in python but for ebooks, audiobooks and magazines.
  • Readarr - One of the many Softwarr out there but with a focus on eBooks and audiobooks. Collection manager for Usenet and BitTorrent users. Can do interesting things with this. Has a dedicated wiki along with other *arr software for documentation, guides and troubleshooting.
  • Komga - A media server for your comics, mangas, BDs, magazines and eBooks
  • Kavita
  • Ubooquity

Web Apps

  • Calibre-Web - Despite its name, its independent of the Calibre project. It is a web based application meant to interact with a Calibre database.

Readers

  • Koreader - Document viewer designed for E-ink devices but does work have a desktop application on Linux.
  • Foliate
  • Koodo Reader
  • Houdoku - Free and open source manga reader.
  • YACReader - Yet Another Comic Reader. A Qt + C++ app for viewing, tracking and organizing your comics. Has many advanced features such as image rotation, double page mode, full size view, fullscreen mode, customizable background color, custom page fitting mode, bookmarks, resume reading, eye candy 'go to', brightness, contrast and gamma sliders, downloading Comic Vine tags, custom search engine and more.
  • Komikku - A Gnome Circle/GTK application for reading manga.
  • Thorium - Open source, cross platform, desktop reader for EPUB.
  • Openlib - Still in beta. Android app that can read books from Anna's Archive.
  • Myne - Android app that downloads and reads books from Project Gutenberg.

Editing

  • Sigil - An advanced editor for the creation of EPUB ebooks.
  • PageEdit - A simplified WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) XHTML editor based on Sigil.

Misc

See Also

  • Ebook readers - Hardware for ebooks as well as custom, non-stock firmware like Koreader that you can load onto specific readers.

External Links

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