Hi,
at Wikimania they were a few discussions about the pertinence to push ZIM, especially if you think EPUB is already really good supported, it's also open, it's also compressed, etc. I made (again) a small benchmark to try to convince the last people who are skeptical.
Here is an example with Simple English Wikipedia without pictures: * Raw content 125342 HTML pages 1.4 GB * ZIM 93 MB Access time of article "Wikipedia" (HTML only) = 0.012s * ZIP 331 MB Access time of article "Wikipedia" (HTML only) = 0.035s
Additional infos: * ZIP random access time is proportional to the count of files, with 3 more HTML files, accessing the same content takes 0.113s (so almost x3) * Please keep in mind that the test were ran on a Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 CPU X 980 @ 3.33GHz * They are no images here... which are often bigger and which would be re-compressed unnecessarily and so bigger in a ZIM * Articles with 20-30 images are common. * Benchmark was made with not so much files... The French Wikipedia has many millions of files
I let you take the conclusion by yourself ;)
Regards Emmanuel