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ePub vs PDF – What’s the Difference?

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The full form of PDF is Portable Document Format and the full form of E- PUB is Electronic Publishing. Mostly E-books are available in these formats. The authors and publishers use different E-Book formats like E-PUB and Pdf formats. These file formats are used for e-books because of their flexibility and portability. This allows customizing e-books.

What is E-PUB?

The full form of E-PUB is Electronic Publishing. It refers to the publishing of e-books, journals, articles, and magazines. This is supported by many e-readers and has compatible software available for many smartphones, PCs, and Tablets. It is published by International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) in 2007.

It is a zip file that consists of style sheets, XML, XHTML files, and JPG for images. It is the most preferred type of file format for e-books.

Advantages

  • These are easier to edit.
  • We can make changes in the HTML codes.
  • It has the ability to reflow its contents.
  • It is very easy to read on screens.
  • If we don’t want our e-books in a reflowable format, E-PUBs also have the option to create fixed-layout e-books.
  • We can easily add media files in this type of format for e-books.
  • It has more security than PDF format.

Disadvantages

  • There are some requirements for creating E-PUB and should have some prior knowledge about using it.
  • We should know the basics and basic language associated with it to create the files in this type of format.

What is PDF?

PDF stands for Portable Document Format. It is the world’s oldest e-book format. It is a digital paper in electronic form. It is used to display documents.

Advantages:

  • It displays the same content and layout without considering the operating system, software application, or device used to view the document.
  • It is very convenient to use.
  • It is very easy to create a document.
  • It is very secure in that we can protect the content and documents by using passwords, watermarking, and digital signatures.
  • It is very compact.

Disadvantages:

  • It is developed as an exchange format for documents.
  • These are very hard to edit.
  • They are also hard to extract the information.
  • We cannot edit the pdf file for free, we need editing software which is costly.
  • The layouts of this type of format are good for printing, but they are hard to view each full page at a time, we should zoom the page and view.

Difference between E-PUB and PDF:

S.no

E-PUB

PDF

1 E-PUB is Electronic Publishing. PDF is Portable Document Format.
2 E-PUB is like a website.  It is a digital paper in electronic.
3 These files are flexible.  These files are more static.
4 This can change some aspects like layout, font size, and color. In this, we cannot change the font size.
5 It is more popular than PDF. It is less popular than E-PUB
6 It is a zip file that consists of style sheets, XML, XHTML files, and JPG for images. It is simple, plain digital paper.
7 It doesn’t need any software. To create a pdf file we need Adobe Acrobat PDF creator.
8 It is very easier to edit the files. It is not much easier to edit the files.
9 It is published in 2007. It is introduced in 1993
10 We make changes in the HTML codes and we can make whatever changes we need to do. In this, we need an Adobe subscription which is very costly to afford.

Last Updated : 12 Jul, 2022
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