Ebooks

Ebooks (sometimes eBooks, 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

The first envisioned ebook (and ebook reader) was a project called DynaBook which conceptualized by Alan Kay, the creator of one of the first and very influential object-oriented programming language called smalltalk and the one who coined the term object oriented programming, to be used for education and similar environments. Unfortunately, the project was scrapped.

Formats

E-Books come in a variety of formats so its pretty important to know them and their characteristics.

IDPF

International Digital Publishing Forum or IDPF 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 and now under the leadership of 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

• OEB - IDPF's first format using HTML, XML, and optional stylesheet.

ePUB

An open format for eBooks. Preferred format for many.

• EPUB / EPUB 2 - OEB 2.0 was renamed EPUB as it varied greatly from the previous format. So EPUB and EPUB 2.0 are the same thing. It now uses XHTML instead of HTML and supports CSS.
• 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 - Kobo's proprietary spin on ePub with many changes especially with rendering and metadata. Can double tap to zoom in.
• AZW3 - Amazon's answer to the aging MOBI format. Like MOBI, it retains some remaining Palm elements like the database but the text itself is now based on EPUB instead of PalmDoc.

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

Amazon Word

KF

Kindle Format

• AZW - Based on MOBI which itself is extended from PalmDoc. Basically the same thing but with better compression and different DRM scheme. Has been deprecated in favor of AZW3 and AZW4.
• AZW2 - Experimental format that isn't even an ebook format. It was designed for small mobile games like chess to play on a Kindle reader. There wasn't really a point as the Kindle Fire Tablet is pretty successful.
• AZW3 | KF8 - First appeared on the Kindle Fire hence its other name. Loosely based on ePUB but still retains legacy elements of MOBI such as the Palm Database. Designed as a modern replacement to MOBI.
• AZW4 - Based on PDF but wrapped with the Palm Database. Primarily used for textbooks.

Other

• PDF - File format created by Adobe for the purpose of digitizing print ready documents. Was under their control for a long time but was later thankfully standardized and now managed by ISO.
• DjVu - A forgotten PDF competitor made by Léon Bottou and many 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 and Unix hipsters. 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 - Extended from PalmDoc. Made by a French company called MobiPocket in 2000 which also sold software that was capable of reading ebooks well across multiple devices such as Personal Digital Assistants, phones, and desktops. Became very popular in the ebook ecosystem which prompted Amazon to buy it in 2005. Amazon continued to use it as their main book format for years. Even after AZW came out in 2007 and AZW in 2011, it was still well supported. Was finally killed off when Amazon made it so that MOBI could no longer uploaded to Kindle reader using Send to Kindl(A lot of normies use this feature instead of using Calibre or plugging it to a computer and manually sending over the file) and would autoconvert to AZW3.
• LRS | LRF | LRX - Sony was one of 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. LRS is a source format that uses Xylog's XML scheme and it would compile and archive into LRF or LRX if it had a DRM scheme.

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 mid 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

Applications that will enhance your reading experience.

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.
• OpenBooks - Tool to downloads ebooks and audiobooks from IRChighway.
• Komga - A media server for your comics, mangas, BDs, magazines and eBooks
• Kavita - FOSS digital library for sharing your collection of comics, manga, and eBooks.
• Ubooquity

Web Apps

• Calibre-Web - Despite its name, it's independent and shares no relation to 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 - A simple WebKitGTK application for reading ebooks on Linux. Has features such as reading text aloud with with Speech Dispatcher, advanced rendering of various scripts (even vertically writing), and looking up words with wiktionary, and more. Has a Snap and Flatpack.
• Koodo Reader - Cross platform desktop and web application (and plans additional support for mobile in future) with advanced features such as being able to backup and sync across devices.
• Houdoku - Free and open source manga reader.
• YACReader - Yet Another Comic Reader. A Qt and 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 and Conversion

• 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.
• Kindle Comic Converter - Despite its name, it now supports more than just Kindle. It is a python script that converts Comic Book Archives as well as PDFs (only extracts the JPG files) into ereader friendly formats like AZW or EPUB.
• Kepubify - Converts ePUBs to kepub format. While Kobo can read ePubs, kepub, especially when it comes to rendering, is much more optimized for their devices.

Management

• Citadel - Upcoming e-book manager that is compatible with Calibre libraries.

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

• Anna's Archive - Z-Library successor for based gentoomen that disregard Intellectual Property laws.
• Project Gutenberg - Oldest digital Library. Created by Michael S. Hart back in 1971 to digitize, archive and distribute cultural works outside of US copyright. Began with digitalizing the Declaration of Independence and distributing it on ARPAnet. They expanded their catalog and later on distributed their ebooks on BBS, Usenet, and Gopher then eventually the Internet. While it has a huge library, most of their ebooks are poorly formatted.
• Standard Ebooks - Created to fix many of the issues that plague free, public domain ebook sites like poor typesetting and metadata, especially those from Project Gutenberg and Internet Archive. They have a clean and consistent standard and distribute their books in ereader friendly formats.
• MobileRead Wiki - Very helpful wiki relating to on-the-go book reading.
  • Free eBooks
  • eBook stores