Common features of reflowable EPUBs

- [Narrator] Reflowable EPUBs are what most people think of when you say, Ebook. Let's look at some common features of a reflowable EPUB. I've opened up the English Cotton Gardens reflowable file from the exercise files and iBooks and I'm double clicking and it opens up to chapter one. It pay open up to a different page if you've been working with it for a while. IBooks remembers your most recent page and if you're on Windows you should use Adobe Digital Editions to open up the Ebook.

So, a reflowable Ebook reflows to fit the screen size. That's the point. When you have a reflowable Ebook you can access the controls for type size, for example. Up here I'm clicking the small and large A and I can make the type smaller or larger, well I guess I'm at the smallest size now and the text is reflowing to fit. So, the line breaks are changing. If you've loaded up an eBook in some sort of E-reader and you don't see a control for changing the type size or the font.

Then you know that you're not looking at a reflowable EPUB. Reflowable EPUBs can also optionally have different fonts embedded in them. There are some device fonts that automatically are available to eBooks. Depending on which device you're using and the designer may have also embedded different ones. So, you see like this font here, Encouraging Variety, is pretty funky and that's not a font that comes loaded and you see over here where it says book font original, that means it's using the publishers fonts, but you can change to one of these other built in fonts.

If you prefer. If you find that easier to read or go back to the original. You can also change the background. Now this is not a feature of every single EPUB reader, but it is for iBooks. And then this is night mode. So, I'll go back to black ink on white. You can also change the number of pages that are showing depending on the E-reader that you are using, but up here I can go to the view menu and change from two pages to single page. If I want and the screen resizes to do that.

You can also just change the screen size, if I'd like. That's not something you can do say on an iPhone or iPad. Well I guess you could do it, but on a desktop you can change that. To move through the book you're either going to scroll or you're going to click left and right and reflowable EPUB also let's you select copy. So, I can swipe over some text and copy it or add a note or do other things depending on the E-reader that I'm using. There are some eBooks that you might open where you can't select the copy, for example there's a format called Kindle replica.

That I'll talk about in the Kindle chapter. That looks like a regular eBook, but actually all the pages are pictures of a page. A reflowable EPUB you can always select the text and then copy it and paste it elsewhere or do other things with it. Another feature that every reflowable EPUB has is a integrated table of contents. There's going to be some control in your E-reader software or device that let's you see the table of contents and here it's this little menu here. This is a requirement for EPUBs that they have a navigation table of contents.

Depending on the eBook some eBooks also have an HTML table of contents, like this one here. So, it's part of the book itself, but this is not required. Just the navigational TLC is required. So, reflowable EPUBs commonly have very few pictures or graphs or charts. They're mostly text heavy books and these are the kind of files that you will get when you download an eBook from a library. They will almost always be reflowable EPUB.

They have very few fixed layout EPUBs. Reflowable EPUBs can also be copy protected, but only if you are selling them via a publisher online, like the Kindle store or the iBook store or Kobo you can optionally turn on copy protection. So, the person who downloads it can't share it with somebody else. When you think of an eBook most people are thinking of this format right here. A reflowable EPUB and you can always tell if you're looking at reflowable EPUB if you can select the text if you can change the type size and font and if there's an integrated table of contents.