Practically, for many pirate ebooks you can find in both ePub and PDF you better choose PDF because it looks and reads like the original while the ePub version probably is almost garbage with broken tables, code quotes etc.
As a format FB2 is better than ePub because it separates the content from the view while ePub mixes them heavily. I usually convert ePub to FB2 before reading just to force my PocketBook reader to use its default typesetting instead of that hardcoded in the ePub file. FB2 also is much more convenient to process programmatically and it defines more meaningful metadata than ePub.
> As a format FB2 is better than ePub because it separates the content from the view while ePub mixes them heavily.
Problem is that as soon as you need some typographical or layout feature beyond what is natively supported by FB2 you're out of luck.
With ePub you still have a chance of manually creating some custom effects before having to give up and fall back to a PDF.
Now granted, for your typical run-of-the-mill novel it's usually not a problem, because those rarely do anything non-standard with regards to layouting or typography.
However some books do play around with their layouting and/or typography, sometimes quite heavily. House of Leaves e.g. would be impossible to properly reproduce in FB2, and since that particular book goes really overboard in terms of playing around with the page layout, I think even as an ePub it'd be quite a feat to successfully pull it off.
>Practically, for many pirate ebooks you can find in both ePub and PDF you better choose PDF because it looks and reads like the original while the ePub version probably is almost garbage with broken tables, code quotes etc.
The reverse can be true as well, where the pdf is some badly compiled epub.
And with the epub at least you can always read the actual text, without repeated swiping for each line.
Not really.
Practically, for many pirate ebooks you can find in both ePub and PDF you better choose PDF because it looks and reads like the original while the ePub version probably is almost garbage with broken tables, code quotes etc.
As a format FB2 is better than ePub because it separates the content from the view while ePub mixes them heavily. I usually convert ePub to FB2 before reading just to force my PocketBook reader to use its default typesetting instead of that hardcoded in the ePub file. FB2 also is much more convenient to process programmatically and it defines more meaningful metadata than ePub.