How to store and serve e-books and in which format?

Question

I am building an web site for consuming e-books online think of OpenLibrary. Since this is my first time working with e-books, I had following questions

1. Which format is the most developer friendly and applicable for such an use case? I had epub in mind? Should I consider any other format?

2. What would be the right way to store the e-books? Would storing them in the database be better or storing the unzipped epub files on some storage like s3?

If this is not the right place to ask this question, please guide me to appropriate one.

Answer 1

1. I think you should also consider AZW and MOBI, since Kindle is a major player in the market. But between PDF and EPUB, I'd go EPUB just because PDF still does not support flowable text (yet). Flowable text is important because your book can be read in devices of different sizes.

2. There's a big flame war on the web if you must store binary files as a (B)LOB column in the database or if you must just keep the file somewhere and serve it on request, storing only the metadata in the DB. I myself do prefer the BLOB column, but I have to agree that storing just the metadata has some strong arguments. So "do as I say, not as I do" and store your books outside the DB.