Comparison of e-book formats

The following is a comparison of e-book formats used to create and publish e-books.

The EPUB format is the most widely supported vendor-independent XML-based (as opposed to PDF) e-book format; that is, it is supported by the largest number of e-Readers, including Amazon Kindle Fire (but not standard Kindle). See table below for details.

Formats available include, but are not limited to:

The digital book format originally used by Sony Corporation. It is a proprietary format, but some reader software for general-purpose computers, particularly under GNU/Linux (for example, Calibre's internal viewer), have the capability to read it. The LRX file extension represents a DRM encrypted eBook. More recently, Sony has converted its books from BBeB to EPUB and is now issuing new titles in EPUB.

CHM format is a proprietary format based on HTML. Multiple pages and embedded graphics are distributed along with metadata as a single compressed file. The indexing is both for keywords for full text search.

The Digital Accessible Information SYstem (DAISY) is an XML-based open standard maintained by the DAISY Consortium for people with print disabilities. DAISY has wide international support with features for multimedia, navigation and synchronization. A subset of the DAISY format has been adopted by law in the United States as the National Instructional Material Accessibility Standard (NIMAS), and K-12 textbooks and instructional materials are now required to be provided to students with disabilities.

DAISY is already aligned with the EPUB technical standard, and is expected to fully converge with its forthcoming EPUB3 revision.

DjVu is a format specialized for storing scanned documents. It includes advanced compressors optimized for low-color images, such as text documents. Individual files may contain one or more pages. DjVu files cannot be re-flowed.

The contained page images are divided in separate layers (such as multi-color, low-resolution, background layer using lossy compression, and few-colors, high-resolution, tightly compressed foreground layer), each compressed in the best available method. The format is designed to decompress very quickly, even faster than vector-based formats.

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