Published as a .pdb
eReader is a program for viewing Palm Digital Media electronic books. Versions are available for PalmOS, PocketPC, Symbian OS, Windows, Windows Mobile Editions, Windows Mobile Smartphone, and Macintosh.
The reader shows text one page at a time as paper books do. eReader supports embedded hyperlinks and images. Most eReader formatted books are encrypted, with the key being the purchaser’s full name and credit card number.
This information is not stored in the ebook though. A one-way hash is used, so there is little or no risk of the user’s information being extracted.
Published as an .lit
LIT files are only readable in the proprietary Microsoft Reader program, as the .LIT format, otherwise similar to Microsoft’s CHM format, includes Digital Rights Management features.
The MS reader uses patented ClearTypeŽ display technology.
In Reader navigation works with a keyboard, mouse, stylus, or through electronic bookmarks. The Catalogue Library records reader books in a personalized “home page”, and books are displayed with ClearType to improve readability. A user can add annotations and notes to any page, create large-print e-books with a single command, or create free-form drawings on the reader pages. A built-in dictionary allows the user to look up words.
Published as .djvu
DjVu is a file format that has been long in obscurity, but that is starting to surface now that free tools to manipulate the files are available.
DjVu is a format that particularly excels in storing scanned images. There are even advanced compressors especially specializing in low-color images, such as text documents. Individual files may contain single pages, or they can be collections of multiple pages.
The images are divided in separate layers (such as multi-color, low-resolution, lossily-compressed background layer, and few-colors, high-resolution, tightly-compressed foreground layer), each compressed in best applicable method. The files are also designed to decompress very fast, even faster than vector-based formats.
The advantage of DjVu is that it is possible to take a high-resolution scan (300-400 DPI), good enough for both on-screen and printing, and store it very efficiently. Several dozens of 300 DPI black-and-white scans can be stored in less than a megabyte.
Published as .ps
PostScript is a page description language used primarily in the electronic and desktop publishing areas for describing the contents of a printed page in a higher level than the actual output bitmap.
Published as a pdf
A file format created by Adobe Systems, initially to provide a standard form for storing and editing printed publishable documents. Because documents in .pdf format can easily be seen and printed by users on a variety of computer and platform types, they are very common on the World Wide Web. But since they are designed to reproduce page images, and the text cannot be re-flowed to fit the screen width, PDF files designed for printing on standard paper sizes are hard to view on screens with limited size or resolution.
Adobe has addressed the issue of people viewing PDF files on smaller screens as are found on PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants). Adobe’s Acrobat Reader for the PDA now has a re-flow facility. Unfortunately, certain settings need to be in place at the time the PDF document is created for it to be re-flow-able, which means many existing PDF documents won’t benefit from this new feature. These settings can be found at Reflow the contents of Adobe PDF documents: Tutorial.
PDF files are created mainly using Adobe Acrobat, but Acrobat Capture and other Adobe products also support their creation, as do third-party products such as PDFCreator, OpenOffice.org, and FOP. Acrobat Reader (now simply called Adobe Reader) is Adobe’s product used to view PDF files. PDF files typically contain product manuals, brochures, magazine articles, or flyers as they can embed fonts, images, and other documents. A PDF file contains one or more page images, each of which you can zoom in on or out from. The PDF format can include interactive elements such as buttons for forms entry and for triggering sound and Quicktime or AVI movies. Acrobat PDF files are optimized for the Web by rendering text before graphic images and hypertext links. Adobe’s PDF-like e-book format is incorporated into their reader.
The TeX format is a popular academic format. TeX is a typesetting system written by Donald Knuth, especially for technical writing applications in the scientific communities of mathematics and computer science. TeX can typeset complex mathematical formulas, but is now also being used for many other typesetting tasks especially in template packages. Few people write in plain TeX any more.
LaTeX is a TeX document preparation system with programmable features and facilities for automating aspects of typesetting and desktop publishing, especially numbering and cross-referencing, tables and figures, page layout, and bibliographies. LaTeX was originally written in 1984 by Leslie Lamport and has become a leading method for using TeX
Also known as Microsoft Compressed HTML Help
CHM format is a proprietary format based HTML. Multiple pages and embedded graphics are distributed along with proprietary metadata as a single compressed file. In contrast, in HTML, a site consists of multiple HTML files and associated image files in standardized formats.
Plucker is a free e-book reader application with its own associated file format and software to automatically generate plucker files from HTML files, web sites or RSS feeds. The format is a compressed HTML archive, somewhat like Microsoft’s CHM.
TEI Lite is the most popular of the TEI-based (and thus XML-based or SGML-based) electronic text formats.
FictionBook is a popular XML-based e-book format, supported by free readers such as Haali Reader and FBReader.
