Questions about epub and mobi

What is the point of epub and mobi?
PDF works fine, no?
Also, what is the absolute best epub reader? It can be paid software, I don't care.

As far as I can tell the main thing with epub is that it can scale text to suit different e-readers and different user tastes. PDF doesn't support that. I have several useful PDFs that I just can't read on my kindle because they are designed to be read on A4 and the formatting is locked down.

>PDF doesn't support that.
Huh? I think it does.

>As far as I can tell the main thing with epub is that it can scale text to suit different e-readers and different user tastes.
This

ePub and Mobi have what is called "reflow support" for viewing on arbitrary page size, font size, margins, etc.

Essentially this requires a different set of formatting controls which, instead of locking format to each page, control how it reacts to resizing/repaging.

A well-compiled ePub or Mobi will adapt sensibly to any number of viewer use cases without becoming gibberish or sending figures/images off to random points in the text (looking at you, word .doc)

It doesn't far as I know of.

Epub is better for reading in book format regarding multiple devices.

>A well-compiled ePub or Mobi
Rare.
Every mobi/epub I purchased had
- DRM
- shit tier support for different devices
- not compatible with all the platform/viewers
PDF is a long and well established standard, PDFA is a standard for legal depts and businesses.

And yes, I had to DeDRM all those epub and convert them to PDF to actually share with colleagues (who wouldn't touch an epub with a ten foot pole)

>(who wouldn't touch an epub with a ten foot pole)

geez.
why tho

>What is the point of epub and mobi?
Usually have books in ePub format on my phone / tablet

If you cant figure it out yourself 5 seconds with your search engine of choice will tell you why PDF is utter shit and epub is superior

>Every mobi/epub I purchased had DRM
you're thinking of AZW senpai. Mobi does not have DRM support and epub:

"While ePub is an industry standard that is generally well defined they did not define a method for even identifying DRM content. There is no standard implementation for this format."

About your last question: if you're on desktop/laptop/workstation, the only cross-platform (and pretty standard) solution I know of is Calibre.

Because they can't open it with a PDF reader.

De facto standards are the only standards that matter.

epub/mobi contains just the text that can be formatted/colored as you see fit. PDF formatting is fixed. I like reading my books as yellow on black, epub/mobi is better.

>with a PDF reader.
For "PDF reader", I mean Adobe Acrobat.
Yes, Okular may open other formats, but realistically people have Adobe Acrobat installed because their mom told them so (and sadly it's still the only PDF reader supporting electronically signed documents; there's some progress in the GNU world but still nothing)

I'm not sure about mobi, but epub is literally just a compressed HTML document, so it can be displayed on any device.
>Absolute best epub reader
On mobile? Google Play Books. Desktop? Calibre.

Various PDF readers (for Android and for desktop) allow to directly invert the colours of the PDF (eventually preserving the right colours of images).

Except they don't work anywhere near as well as just using epub (for obvious reasons)

It doesn't because it goes directly against the entire concept of a PDF file.
PDF was created as a way to retain the exact same layout (no fucked up text because a font isn't installed, no shifting around of images, etc.) of a document regardless of the platform it's viewed on.

sumatrapdfreader
THIS

>On mobile? Google Play Books.
lel what is moonreader

> Desktop? Calibre.
lel what is adobe digital editions

>what is adobe digital editions
Absolute shit, that's what
>lel
Why don't you get

not in my experience

and PDFs are fucking trash on eInk screens since you can't (easily) pan and the format and reflow hacks rarely do the job.

>Every mobi/epub I purchased had DRM
>purchased
There's your problem.

This