The Ebook Doctor Mailbag – Epub and Pdf – the differences.

Part II of the series by David Cronin explains EPUB and PDF formats.
Simply put, an Ebook is a ‘packaged’ website, and an E-reader is a hand-held web browser.
The EPUB format was introduced in 2007 as a format to enable viewing of electronic documents in a completely different way.
The Ebook contains a series of connected web pages which can be displayed using a browser. The pages are stored inside a “Package” or “Container”. For EPUB this has the .epub file extension.
What is very different with Ebooks is that they are designed to be “reflowable”. The text size and fonts do not come from the EPUB file itself but, just like on a computer, the available fonts are stored on the E-reader and the user can choose the default font type, font size, page margins etc.