Article updated on January 23, 2021 by Byothe
Digital books are more fashionable than ever. In France, in 2017, 21% of readers read digital books… that’s 4 times more than in 2012.
But this growing success must nevertheless face certain pitfalls: prices not so attractive, unavailability of certain books, multitude of formats not compatible between different e-readers.
In this article, we'll tell you about the most common formats, explain their advantages and disadvantages, and show you how to read them.
EPUB
The EPUB (Electronic PUBlication) is the most popular ebook format. Originally developed by theInternational Digital Publishing Forum (which is now part of the World Wide Web Consortium), it replaced the older Open eBook (OEB) digital book format in 2007.
Since EPUB is a free, open, and vendor-neutral standard, it has easily established itself as the go-to format for e-books. Although these features are rarely used, the format can even support color images, SVG graphics, interactive elements, and videos.
In many ways, EPUB is to ebooks what MP3 is to digital music – in both good and bad ways. Almost all current e-readers and operating systems support the format… but publishers can embed DRM systems to restrict the use of their publications. Of course, there are ways to bypass this DRM, but that’s not the subject of this article.
On the downside, Kindles cannot read EPUB format (except for the Kindle Fire tablet).
MOBI
The MOBI format was created in the early 2000s by the French company Mobipocket, a digital bookstore, for its ebook reading software, Mobipocket Reader.
In 2005, even before the Kindle was launched, Amazon acquired Mobipocket. In October 2016, Amazon eventually shut down Mobipocket's website and servers, but the MOBI format continues to exist.
There are some important differences between EPUB and MOBI. This format cannot support audio or video, but most importantly, it is not a free standard and therefore not publicly available.
Most e-readers on the market support the MOBI format except Nook in the United States.
AZW and AZW3
The AZW and AZW3 extensions are Amazon's two proprietary ebook formats. AZW is the older of the two; it debuted with the first Kindle in 2007. AZW3 arrived in 2011 with the release of the Kindle Fire.
Every time you buy or download an ebook from Amazon, you receive it on your device in one of these two formats. AZW3 is more advanced than AZW. It supports more styles, fonts, and layouts.
In practice, both formats are extremely similar to the MOBI format. Although it has never been publicly confirmed, it is widely believed that Amazon purchased Mobipocket so that it could use the underlying technology as the basis for its AZW format. Unlike the MOBI format, Amazon's formats support both video and audio.
Because AZW is a proprietary format, it is not as widely supported on e-readers as EPUB and MOBI. Naturally, all Amazon products can read the format, but other popular devices such as the Nook and Kobo cannot…
The latest major e-book format in circulation is PDF. Due to the widespread adoption of this format on the web, PDFs have become a popular way to deliver e-books.
Its major drawback is the inability to adapt the presentation according to the screen size or the parameters selected by a user. The page of a PDF remains frozen and its ergonomics are often poorly adapted.
Basically, despite its universality, PDF is a bit of a poor relation of ebooks.
Other ebook formats to know about
LRS, LRF and LRX
LRS, LRF, and LRX are the file extensions for the Broad Band eBook format. These were proprietary formats that Sony created for its own line of e-readers.
LRS is now an open format, but LRF and LRX remain closed. Regardless, Sony has abandoned all three formats in favor of EPUB.
FB2
The XML-based FB2 (FictionBook) format was developed in Russia. This format has the particularity of storing metadata in the ebook file itself.
DJVU
The DJVU format is particularly popular in the scientific community. Its compression is about 10 times higher than that of PDF; it can store more than 100 black and white scans in less than a megabyte.
LIT
LIT was Microsoft's proprietary format. When an ebook in LIT format was DRM protected, the books were only readable on the Microsoft Reader application.
In 2011, Microsoft discontinued the LIT format. The Reader app disappeared in early 2018.
And finally, is there a format that stands out?
Let's be clear, the only formats you need to worry about are EPUB, MOBI and AZW. These are the most universal! The others are more anecdotal or very specific.
Finally, if you want to build and manage an ebook library, I can only recommend the excellent software Caliber. With the latter, no need to ask questions about the format, it will take care of converting according to your e-reader!
