EpubCCIs EPUB better than PDF for e-readers?
Updated:
For books and documents that are mostly running text, yes: an EPUB re-flows to fit the screen and the font size you choose, while a PDF is a fixed printed page that an e-reader can only shrink or zoom. For pages whose layout is the content, such as comics, sheet music or forms, the PDF is still the better file.
Fixed layout vs. reflowable text
What changes on a 6-inch screen
A PDF page is usually designed for A4 or US Letter paper. On a 6- or 7-inch e-reader the whole page is scaled down until it fits, so body text often ends up smaller than the smallest font the device offers. Zooming in brings the text back to a readable size but then every line runs off the screen, and you pan sideways line after line.
An EPUB stores the text and its structure (paragraphs, headings, chapters, notes and images) instead of positions on a page. The reading app breaks the lines itself, so the same file fits a phone, a Kindle, a Kobo or a tablet, in portrait or landscape, at any font size.
What you get with an EPUB
- Your own font, size, margins and line spacing, and night mode.
- A table of contents you can jump from, and footnotes that open as pop-ups on readers that support them.
- Dictionary lookups, highlights and notes that follow the text instead of a position on a page.
- Smaller files than most PDFs, because text is stored once and not as page drawings.
When the PDF is better
- Comics, picture books and cookbooks where text and images share a designed page.
- Sheet music, maps, forms and technical drawings.
- Documents you need to quote by printed page number, and pages full of tables.
The catch: the conversion
An EPUB is only as good as the structure recovered from the PDF. Broken paragraphs, running headers in the middle of sentences and columns read across the page are the usual failures. That is why EpubCC shows a free sample of your own file before you pay, and why the benchmark below compares engines on the same documents.
Evidence from the benchmark
| Engine | 8-gram recall |
|---|---|
| EpubCC engine (EPUB output) | 0.767 |
| EpubCC engine (plain text) | 0.765 |
| pdf_oxide · extract_text | 0.726 |
| pdf_oxide · to_plain_text (XY-cut) | 0.658 |
| pdf_oxide · Markdown | 0.653 |
| PDFium · text().all() | 0.746 |
| OpenDataLoader PDF (local mode) | 0.749 |
| pdftotext (Poppler) | 0.743 |
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