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Comment by zozbot234 | Hacker News Reader

> The new KFX format has one major advantage over EPUB. The images can be stored out-of-band.

EPUB is just a ZIP file. It's perfectly feasible to read the HTML/CSS and image portions separately.

Then you need to preprocess EPUB to know which order to load images, along with complicated client side download to download part by part and reassemble the .EPUB after all download are done.

Not sure if that is strictly easier than just new format (which allow you to add more features you wanted too)

That just depends on how the client consumes it. I'm the developer of Kavita and our reader doesn't download the epub at all. We read one page of the epub and rewrite the html and send it to the UI to be rendered. This way it loads like a normal html page (without having the iframe mess), images can load later, Javascript can still work within it, etc.

https://kavitareader.com for those interested.

But at that point your client isn't really reading EPUB isn't it?

Amazon backend accept EPUB (either from KDP or from Send to Kindle). Amazon then process EPUB into Amazon own format, and deliver that to Kindle device. Which sounds a lot like what you described.

Btw your project is interesting. Does it support vertical-rl EPUB? After finding out Moon Reader+ doesn't it make me doubting everything now.

And yet Apple Books have no qualms about it and support epub.

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