[LINK] Ebooks for government reports?

[Ivan Trundle]

On 08/02/2010, at 10:36 AM, Pilcher, Fred wrote:

> What's the advantage of EPUB or its ilk over HTML? Is it a proprietary
> format? Can't e-book readers read HTML?

You're not the first person to ask this question...

The ePub format is currently evolving (consider the timeline as being equivalent to when CSS was first introduced for web coders).

Because ePub formats use XHTML, it does away with sloppy coding and ill-defined tags.

ePub format does a few things well in addition to this: contents and reading order can be specified, and metadata containers offer useful additional information.

One nasty side-effect: DRM is introduced...

HTML is too freeform to make it easy for standardisation of formats.

However, it's not hard for a browser to read ePub material, which is possibly why you are wondering.

iT