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