EBook Reader Review – File Formats
It’s one thing to find the features and price combination that you like in an ebook reader. What you may not think of is the variety of file formats available and what your chosen reader can handle. You don’t want to be surprised when you start looking for books and discover that your reader can’t handle the format in which the book is produced.
Almost all the readers support HTML, MP3, txt and JPG, all very common file formats. Things become a bit more complex when you start to look at proprietary formats offered by individual manufacturers. Amazon uses a format called.azw, a variant of Mobipocket, and the open source ePub. Amazon’s Kindle does not support ePub; almost all other devices do.
The largest publishers have books available in the ePub format. ePub is an open source format and allows book designers to create titles that are formatted better than Amazon’s azw file format. If you would rather not deal with Digital Rights Management (DRM) on you ebook reader you have a better chance of finding DRM-free books in the ePub format than the.azw format. So right now, if you are contemplating an ebook reader purchase, you need to keep in mind that you may limit the number of titles you have access to to those available on Amazon.
The Sony ebook readers also have a proprietary format called Broadband eBook (or BeBB) or LRF. Sony probably developed this format to drive consumers to titles available on their own store, but they had the foresight to allow their devices to read the ePub formatted ebooks.
If you’ve done any amount of searching on the internet you’ve encountered ‘PDF’ files. These have become the standard way people pass along or sell information and ebooks. The problem with the pdf format is it doesn’t translate well to your ebook reader due to size limitations. Amazon and Sony, both offer ways to convert pdf files for use on their devices.
For more information and reviews about ebook readers visit my page at http://reviewebookreader.com
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Daniel from spanish translator on May 13th, 2010
These electronic readers can be a great relief to improve the ecology, because the world can save a lot of paper. I doubt that it can replace traditional book.