We offer about 9 different formats. This has always been subject to review re the evolving technology, and we are looking at the extra time we take to convert—and vet, which is the time-heavy part—all 9 of these formats.
What would be the feeling if we offered principally .mobi/.epub/.pdf/.html (basically our ‘mini’ offering)? Anybody in possession of one of those can use Calibre and/or Sigil to convert to other formats…
What we’d like to learn is whether anybody out there’s using a format other than one of those four, and if so, which. After two years, we’re pretty sure the tech has concentrated around those four—but without asking, we don’t know for sure.
My preferences for my Android tablet and cell phone are .epub and then .pdf!
epub and pdf here, too
mobi here.
I’m with HRHSpence, I use either epub or pdf for my Sony eReader. It will take the other formats, but I usually stick with those two.
Mobi for me! It does seem like the market has boiled down to those you listed. Those using the obscure formats have got to be used to converting things on their own by now.
CJ, I think those four formats are PLENTY. Personally, I wouldn’t even give the HTML option (although since it’s your base for conversion to other formats, it’s no extra work. FWIW, sales of my own book over 5 months and 3k digital copies have been well over 90% Kindle (mobi); I myself have a Nook, but they’re rare. iPads can read just about anything I think, so I’d say those four formats cover everything.
I fully agree with this. mobi, epub, and pdf will cover 99.9% of readers, and html will cover the remaining 0.1% because anyone on any system can read html in a browser.
And anyone using a cellphone to read on can download the Nook or Kindle reader.
INK ON PAPER!
Hrumph! Nothing beats “random access”. Computers don’t still hold all their data on sequential magnetic tapes, do they?
mobi here for my Kindle “Far.” The only other option I utilize is the tried and true dead tree edition.
I’d think epub, mobi and pdf should be sufficient.
I’m sure you know that mobi is now two formats – original mobi for old Kindles and now KF8 for Kindle Fires and retro-fitted (updated) newer Kindles. Kindlegen builds both formats automatically, and throws in a zipped copy of your source files, too. I think that old Kindles ignore the new part of the file, and new Kindles find the new format part of the file, but the suspicion is that Amazon only sends the appropriate part to each device when you buy from them. I don’t have any Kindle devices, so I can’t test any of this; I’m reporting what I’ve read over at MobileRead.
I agree that epub, mobis, and pdf are probably sufficient; the html can be dug out of the epub file by anybody who wants it 🙂
Oh, and by epub I mean epub2 standard, not Apple’s, or Nook’s or Kobo’s – at least for the next several years. I know Adobe’s Ereader package has bugs, but I think it’s the closest to standard we have.
I agree with your suggestion and the comments, epub, mobi, pdf, and html are plenty. I think it’s much better to create GOOD versions in these formats and stop there. That’s much better then the relatively common practice of creating one version, letting the automated generators do their thing, and never even looking at the result…
I think that we may do this, with the postscript that if you have a device that needs something special, and if you can’t readily convert one of these to your type via Calibre, drop us a note. It would save us a lot of work.
What I’ve seen recently is this. Currently:
Amazon Kindle readers and Kindle apps (for Win, Mac, iOS (iPad, iPhone), Android, etc.) – Use their new, proprietary KF8 or their older .mobi format. (They purchased .mobi .)
Barnes & Noble Nook, Sony eReader, the Kobo, and various apps for Apple iOS (iPad, iPhone, etc.) and Android OS — *all* are using .epub (specifically, EPUB2).
The .pdf format is proprietary to Adobe and is *not* designed for on-screen reflow. It was specifically designed to mimic as exactly as possible a printed document with page sizes and a lot of hard-coded stuff. (And it converts a great deal to images instead of usable text or vector images with text and fonts, which, considering the vendor, is very odd too.)
In other words, while .pdf is good for printing and OK for proofing, it isn’t a good choice for ebook format. It isn’t HTML-based and it converts *very* badly, and text-to-speech readers have trouble with it.
HTML is a good format for a baseline, anyone can view it in a browser, format.
EPUB is a specialization of XHTML. That is, EPUB adds specific features to a more strict flavor of HTML. — EPUB is an open standard like HTML, not proprietary. This is why it’s used by “everyone else” and is gaining ground.
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Future:
EPUB3 is already beginning to be supported by the major ereader devices and apps, Nook, Apple’s iOS, Sony, and Kobo. The format is new and is built on HTML5, CSS3, MathML, and some others. Again, it’s a specifically customized, open standard. Indications are that Amazon’s converter will convert EPUB3 to .mobi or KF8 like it already converts EPUB2. Whether Amazon will move to EPUB3 outright is anybody’s guess.
(Yes, I’m very much looking forward to my pb copy of EPUB 3 Best Practices, by Matt Garrish and Markus Gylling, both of whom were involved in the EPUB3 standard. The book’s by O’Reilly Press, one of their “animal lithograph” covers series, and Amazon assures me it’s on pre-order, due 2013-01-02. They don’t yet (ironically) have the ebook version available for pre-order. The book has a free chapter available on “Accessible EPUB3,” that is, making sure EPUB3 ebooks are best usable regardless of the person’s physical/cognitive abilities: eyesight, hearing, motor-neuromuscular abilities, etc. This also deals with, for example, synching audio and text reading, and offering alternate formats like formatted text and audio, even video and other multimedia, such as recently shown off by Apple in their new iBook textbooks. Very, very bright news for the future of publishing media. Very good for writers self-publishing. I’d also recommend Elizabeth Castro’s books. She’s a tech writer and Catalanist and very on the ball.)
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Summary:
EPUB2, moving to EPUB3, are essential formats for your future sales to readers. (And they’re what the publishing industry will most likely adopt as the preferred standard.)
Amazon’s Kindle .mobi format, moving toward KF8, is essential because they have a huge share of the market. Whether they move to EPUB3 is unknown.
PDF is still important, as many people use it, and it’s essential for print and within the industry.
HTML (preferably moving to HTML5 and CSS3 and away from XHTML 1.1) is essential as it’s readable by any browser currently out there. — EPUB is a “special flavor” of HTML; so are .mobi and KF8. PDF is proprietary and *not* based on HTML.
If it were I, I’d say you might as well drop .lrf and plain .txt and other old formats.
The four you’ve said will get easily 99% of the market now: Kindle, Nook, iOS, Sony, Kobo, browsers on Win, Mac, Linux.
ePub then PDF
I second the request for HTML; for its universality and future-proofing and being basic enough to easily search even outside a reader program. (“Before I post the question ‘What was the Teile in Faery Moon,’ I should check and see if it’s mentioned in The Brothers.”)
I was actually going to say plain TXT, but it serves the same purpose.
As for actual reading, I use Kindle/Mobi, but that could change.
But really, I’d be glad enough having more ebooks/other books to read, even if it means I have to mess with formats a little.
Oh, and BlueCatShip: Thanks for pointing out that ePub is HTML based. Could come in handy some time.
Kindle/Mobi format for me. I can use epub, but I just convert it to Kindle format.
It’s true that PDF is printed-page–oriented.
But the business about not being good for text-to-speech is no longer true (and has not been for the last several versions). As long as the PDF is created from a text-based application (such as, f’rinstance, MS Word), it should read just fine with a screen reader. I’ve tested PDFs with such a tool recently.
If the PDF was created by scanning a paper document … yes, there’s a problem with the text being treated as graphics, unless you run an OCR routine on it. There’s one built into Acrobat Pro, and it works reasonably well as long as your scan is clean. But that’s not the ideal way to create a PDF, especially if you plan to do any sort of searching on the text or if your audience may include folks using screen readers.
Also, if you’ve used more-or-less standard markups in something like Word, most of the logical markup (what’s a header, for example) should come through into the PDF.
Nowadays you can even get decent screen reading with a multicolumn layout on a PDF, although it may require going in and fixing the reading order by hand in Acrobat Pro – not something you’d want to do for a book of several hundred pages, but we do it all the time at my workplace for newsletters, multipanel computer tip brochures, and such.
I download fanfiction from Archive of Our Own in PDF format to read on my Droid phone. It works reasonably well I use the Adobe Acrobat reader for Android.
Chomiji, thanks very much for correcting that, I’ll need to look into it further.
Jaxartes, you’re welcome.
Epub and mobi definitely cover the majority of current ebook readers. PDF format is occasionally the only version that displays exactly like the author wanted. HTML is convenient for reading in a browser, but can easily be extracted from EPUB if needed.
If those were the only formats available, I personally would be content. Some of the other formats occasionally have nice features, but honestly I generally choose epub, pdf, mobi, html in that order.