Despite the fact that the current pace of life leaves us little time to relax, reading is still one of the favorite activities for many people to spend their free time. What has changed has been the way of reading. While until a few years ago paper books were the best (and almost only) option, there are more and more followers of electronic books, or ebooks, that we can read anywhere and, almost, on any device.
Each type of book has its own advantages , as well as can have its own drawbacks. For example, there are many users who like to touch, feel and smell the book printed on paper, in addition to relaxing their eyes much more with them, while others prefer the advantages of electronic books, such as portability of the same (which does not make us carry several kilos of paper on our back), being able to always carry all our favorite books on top, and, above all, the price of these, since they are usually much cheaper in digital format than in physical format.
We can find e-books in several different formats. And depending on the way in which we are going to read the epub we will have to choose one or the other. Thus, these are the most used.
Most used formats for ebooks
The most widespread format among electronic books is EPUB (Electronic PUBlication). This is the most widespread and most used format when we talk about electronic books. Many readers, and most programs for opening these documents, are compatible with it. In 2007, this format became standard, replacing the Open eBook.
Second we have the MOBI format. This format was created by Mobipocket. Its main characteristic is that this format marks its content, but does not delimit the format, so it adjusts without problems to all types of screens. In addition, this format supports DRM, which made many stores, such as Amazon, bet on it for the books that are sold. The Kindle, the most popular ebook reader, has always used this format, although lately it is being replaced by AZW , very similar to MOBI but developed by Amazon.
If what we are looking for is a comic or comic, then the most popular formats that we can find with CBZ and CBR (Comic Book Reader). This format is nothing more than a container, in ZIP (CBZ) or RAR (CBR) within which are the images (in JPEG) of each of the comic pages. The format as such has no mystery (we can even open it with any compressor), and those who process the pages are the readers themselves.
Finally, it is possible to find also books in PDF format. However, although PDF has some advantages (basically, it will look the same on any device), in reality this may also be its biggest disadvantage. Opening a PDF with an ebook will not fit the font to the screen size. The page will display as an image, and it will be impossible to read.
There are many other ebook formats, such as FB2, BBeB or AEH, as well as DOC, HTML and even TXT files. But, in practice, the ones that we are going to find are the above.