I try to stay format agnostic when it comes to decisions like this and let our stats speak for themselves. Both formats have their pros/cons and each one has a dedicated user base.
Ignoring ePUB would limit our offline reach while neglecting openZIM would impair improving a burgeoning new format that's proven itself to be quite useful for our needs.
Both really should be in our export toolkit which is why Jessie and I have been actively discussing their support with WMF IT and PediaPress.
--tomasz
On Mon, Aug 15, 2011 at 4:17 PM, Jessie Wild jwild@wikimedia.org wrote:
+1 to asaf's comment - ZIM does rock!
That said, there are advantages to offering epub support especially for those smaller selections, since, as Emmanuel notes, it is common for devices to support the reading of these files. So I think it is important for us to at least offer that solution in our tool-kit, but our main development focus should continue to be zim.
Jessie
On Wed, Aug 10, 2011 at 8:08 AM, emmanuel@engelhart.org wrote:
On Wed, 10 Aug 2011 14:56:56 +0200, Volker Haas wrote:
We at Pediapress have developed a prototypical epub export for the collection extension.
I just generated epub and zim files for the following collection:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book:American_History
The epub and zim files should contain the same images and otherwise the same content.
http://pediapress.com/files/epubvszim/book.epub http://pediapress.com/files/epubvszim/book.zim
Regarding filesize they are both pretty similar:
book.epub 21.589.212 bytes book.zim 23.500.867 bytes
I can't say anthing about file access times for epub but will my phone I have no performance problem when viewing the epub file.
To the opposite of my test, your benchmark is done on a small content.
For small amount of data, I think this does not really make sense to compare. From the user point of view this should be similar (file size & opening speed).
That's why, in such use case, EPUB has currently a big advantage over ZIM: a lot of devices support it. So EPUB should be for small collection of content and ZIM for big one.
But I still wonder that the ZIM file is bigger than the EPUB. ZIM should be in most of the cases (except maybe for really small "book" with only a few pictures) smaller and faster than EPUB.
I have done a new one (by unzipping the EPUB file) and got a file smaller (~5%) than your EPUB: 20.907.051 bytes
I remarked that your book.epub has almost 20% less entries (908: unzip -l book.epub | wc) than your book.zim (1071: zimdump -l book.zim | wc). This seems to me strange and this could maybe explains why your ZIM file is bigger than your EPUB.
Emmanuel
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