Ebook file formats

[tinpanalley]

Sorry, I know this isn't exclusively Windows and that there are several programs other than Calibre out there but don't know where else to ask this.

Maybe I'm late to the party but has nobody ever invented a file format which is a direct page for page replica of the printed book? A fixed format? I see how it may not matter in a fiction book, but in a cookbook, or guide it can be downright useless to not maintain the book as originally published. Even the different fonts used can sometimes throw off the "UI" chosen for the book.

So, is that it then? Is it just epub and mobi and is there no other file (non PDF) that just gives you an ACTUAL electronic version of a book?

Thanks!

 

[Elixer]

Not sure I understand what you mean?
Are you talking about rendering the pages, and what you are using isn't putting things on a page boundary?
If so, that sounds more like a viewer issue, and not about file format.

 

[tinpanalley]

Not sure I understand what you mean?
Are you talking about rendering the pages, and what you are using isn't putting things on a page boundary?
If so, that sounds more like a viewer issue, and not about file format.

No, what I'm saying is, epub and mobi reformat the text on the page based on what your font, text size, margins, etc etc are. And in a fiction book which is just a long sequence of paragraphs with no special formatting, that doesn't matter. But cookbooks and guides depend on the formatting and design chosen for the print edition. Inlays, special text boxes, images that go directly with text adjacent to them. And that doesn't work if the page can reformat itself. I like the ebook looking exactly like the printed page. Chosen font, artwork, margins, etc. To me the printed book and not just its text, is part of the work.
What I'm asking is if there is any kind of fixed format ebook, and if not, why not. Maybe it's just impractical, maybe it's not what the market wants, maybe unfixed format is the only way to make an ebook sellable to various devices and applications, maybe it's about money, maybe nobody gives a crap. There are lots of audio formats for example that I use and encode that only a very small percentage of people bother with. But they're out there and they have a small community. Just wondering if there's anything like that for ebooks or if exact book page representation is not even the point of ebooks to begin with. Does that make more sense?

 

[mxnerd]

So what's wrong with PDF format? It's exactly what you described, exactly direct page for page replica of the printed book.

There were other competing formats in the past, but all of them lose out.

 

[tinpanalley]

So what's wrong with PDF format? It's exactly what you described, exactly direct page for page replica of the printed book.
There were other competing formats in the past, but all of them lose out.

Well, other than the file size which tends to be huge, there's nothing wrong with pdf but that wasn't my question.
My question was, are there no other files for ebooks that do fixed formatting representations of the printed page? And to your point, with regards to PDF, of course there's nothing wrong with it but I'm pretty sure books aren't made in PDF format.
I'm just trying to figure out why there isn't a format that is a literal digital version of the book, layout and all.

 

[mxnerd]

I printed PDF books before many times and the printed materials look exactly like what are represented in PDF files except the paper size.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_e-book_formats

Portable Document Format
Format: Portable Document Format
Published as: .pdf

Invented by Adobe Systems, and first released in 1993, PDF became ISO 32000 in 2008. The format was developed to provide a platform-independent means of exchanging fixed-layout documents. Derived from PostScript, but without language features like loops, PDF adds support for features such as compression, passwords, semantic structures and DRM. Because PDF documents can easily be viewed and printed by users on a variety of computer platforms, they are very common on the World Wide Web and in document management systems worldwide. The current PDF specification, ISO 32000-1:2008, is available from ISO's website, and under special arrangement, without charge from Adobe.[25]

Because the format is designed to reproduce fixed-layout pages, re-flowing text to fit mobile device and e-book reader screens has traditionally been problematic. This limitation was addressed in 2001 with the release of PDF Reference 1.5 and "Tagged PDF",[26] but 3rd party support for this feature was limited until the release of PDF/UA in 2012.

Many products support creating and reading PDF files, such as Adobe Acrobat, PDFCreator and OpenOffice.org, and several programming libraries such as iText and FOP. Third party viewers such as xpdf and Nitro PDF are also available. Mac OS X has built-in PDF support, both for creation as part of the printing system and for display using the built-in Preview application.

PDF files are supported by almost all modern e-book readers, tablets and smartphones. However, PDF reflow based on Tagged PDF, as opposed to re-flow based on the actual sequence of objects in the content-stream, is not yet commonly supported on mobile devices. Such Re-flow options as may exist are usually found under "view" options, and may be called "word-wrap".

Besides, pdf format is big, but not particularly big in today's standard, unless it's scanned book that's stitched together.

Open XML Paper Specification
Format: OpenXPS
Published as: .oxps, .xps

Open XML Paper Specification (also referred to as OpenXPS) is an open specification for a page description language and a fixed-document format. Microsoft developed it as the XML Paper Specification (XPS). In June 2009, Ecma International adopted it as international standard ECMA-388.[30]

The format is intentionally restricted to sequences of: Glyphs (a fixed run of text), Paths (a geometry that can be filled, or stroked, by a brush), and Brushes (a description of a shaped brush used to in rendering paths).

This reduces the possibility of inadvertent introduction of malicious content and simplifies the implementation of compatible renderers.

On the web page, Adobe's PDF & Microsoft Open XML seems to be the only 2 formats that offer fixed-layout or fixed-cocument.

 

[DaveSimmons]

The wiki page for ePub indicates it does support "fixed-layout content": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPUB

Have you investigated this yourself, or just guessed that what you want is not possible because no one has made the effort to create an ePub cookbook using this formatting?

With fiction books, the I'm guessing the normal authoring process is along the lines of "take your word document(s), import to authoring program, and add chapter markers."

 

[tinpanalley]

Sorry, I seem to have misled everyone with my question.
I'm asking this out of interest in the electronic book industry as a consumer. I'm not publishing anything. I want to know why ebooks aren't made in a fixed format for mass production via Amazon, etc.

 

[DaveSimmons]

My guess: Because the cookbook publishers have decided there is not enough of a market for them.

Apparently most of the people who spend money on cookbooks still want a physical book with glossy color pictures not a black-and-white e-ink ebook version.

The iPad generation probably goes to free cooking websites, and marketing has decided that not enough of them would pay for a color iBook.

 

[tinpanalley]

My guess: Because the cookbook publishers have decided there is not enough of a market for them.

Apparently most of the people who spend money on cookbooks still want a physical book with glossy color pictures not a black-and-white e-ink ebook version.

The iPad generation probably goes to free cooking websites, and marketing has decided that not enough of them would pay for a color iBook.

That sounds right to me. It's just a shame. It's like music. I have never once purchased digital music. I love my music and won't let someone sell me a compressed version of the audio for the price of an uncompressed CD. But there are basically no shops that sell FLAC. Oh well. I'll just keep doing my things my way and choosing not to do what the industry tells us is the way to do it.

 

[mxnerd]

Amazon used to sell PDF format eBooks, not anymore. Now they sell Kindle file format eBooks.

All big players want their own proprietary format.

 

[DaveSimmons]

That sounds right to me. It's just a shame. It's like music. I have never once purchased digital music. I love my music and won't let someone sell me a compressed version of the audio for the price of an uncompressed CD. But there are basically no shops that sell FLAC. Oh well. I'll just keep doing my things my way and choosing not to do what the industry tells us is the way to do it.

I own over 1,100 CDs ripped to FLAC for my jukebox PC, so I resemble that remark

For fiction I've switched to Kindle books though, I ran out of space to store all the books I had.

 

[tinpanalley]

For fiction I've switched to Kindle books though, I ran out of space to store all the books I had.

I would do the same, but really, with certain cookbooks, the layout is too much a part of their functionality. I don't mean, '100 best Italian Recipes'. I mean things like bread baking books, books about meat cuts, books about roasting... these are just things that don't work with pages that reflow their text around images, or ebook formats take a large chart and shrink it or spread it over two pages and separate it from lists or instructions that you then have to digitally swipe back and forth between. I don't know how to describe it, it just doesn't work.

 

[corkyg]

For fiction I've switched to Kindle books though, I ran out of space to store all the books I had.

The wife and I both have Kindles. She gets the book first and when she's done, it goes to our Kindle Cloud for storage. When I am ready, I go to our cloud and download to my Kindle. We never try to store books we have read on our Kindles. We must have several hundred books in our cloud cubby (5-6 years worth!)

 

[Murloc]

colorful cookbooks are often big, too big to be read on e-ink or even a non-huge tablet.

PDF does exactly what you want which is why no other format is used or even exists. If books are not published that way it's because they don't feel a need to I guess.
Cookbooks have been completely killed by the internet anyway.

 

[tinpanalley]

Cookbooks have been completely killed by the internet anyway.

Perhaps for the mainstream casual cook, but not true at all otherwise. Not for anyone seeking culinarily correct information written by people who are experts in their particular field of cuisine. There is not a single website that can offer the detail of information that even famous chefs like Anthony Bourdain and Raymond Blanc or several non-celebrity chefs offer.
In the food world, in fact, cookbooks are pretty much the only thing that makes money any more outside of monetised Youtube videos and product lines.