: Is there a good size comparison of which of different e-book formats is smaller? If I have an option of reading e-books in a range of formats (ebub, mobi, Sony LRF, .lit, rtf, MS Word's .docx,

This is something I find interesting. I'm going to post an answer with some findings. As I discover more, I'll expand on my answer.

Old, But Still Useful Comparisons

This document is fairly old (warning, link is a zip file containing a pdf) and the information may not accurately reflect how things are today. It also does not contain many of the popular formats of today (there is none of the epub formats listed and mobipocket (prc) I believe as a predecessor to .mobi). I'll list the details for historical purposes though.

Excerpt from the report (Copyright 2002 by ePMA -- ePublishing Marketing Associates -- epmaasoc.com):

To make this comparison, we took the Project Gutenberg plain text file
of the book The Metal Monster by Abraham Merritt, stripped it of the
PG legal Disclaimer and such. Next we removed the linefeed/carriage
returns from the end of each line, so paragraphs would flow for
different formatting, and then added basic markup with HTML, to
provide paragraph breaks and chapter headings. Except where noted,
this HTML file was then used to create the eBook in other formats. no
cover or other images were included.

NOTE: This was done for a non-illustrated volume. There was talk of doing another test in the future with an illustrated volume, but I was not able to find it.

Here were the findings:

Format                               Kbytes% Txt
Rocket (fb)                        248K   52%  
Mobipocket (prc)                285K   60%  MS Ebook (lit)                    292K   61%  Plain text (txt)                    477K   100%Web Document (HTML)     487K   102%Embiid (ubk)                       489K   103%MS Word 2002 (doc)         620K   130%hiebook (kml)                     654K   137%Adobe Acrobat (pdf)        691K   145%MS Wordpad (doc)            952K  200%eBook Pack Express (exe)2860K600%

UPDATE

This is a comparison of various ebooks I own in multiple formats. I did not create or convert the formats personally and I am unsure of the exact versions (e.g. epub2 vs epub3). I still thought this might be useful information since all books were generated by the same company (manning). These are all programming books, and as such, they have some images in them and embedded markup language. This should provide a decent comparison vs. something that is only text or mostly images.

The following list of books are compared in epub, mobi and pdf (sizes are in KiloBytes, smallest bolded).

Brownfield Application Development in .NET

epub - 3,447K
mobi - 4,115K
pdf - 8,573K

C# in Depth, Second Edition

epub - 5,429K
mobi - 6,330K
pdf - 8,573K

HTML5 for .NET Developers (results skewed by this book, see below)

epub - 24,533K
mobi - 13,945K
pdf - 13,177K

PowerShell and WMI

epub - 8,797K
mobi - 11,081K
pdf - 14,536K

Real-World Functional Programming With examples in F# and C#

epub - 8,483K
mobi - 9,446K
pdf - 14,536K

The Art of Unit Testing with Examples in .Net

epub - 4,280K
mobi - 4,754K
pdf - 9,535K

The Art of Unit Testing with examples in .Net, Second Edition

epub - 3,784K
mobi - 4,356K
pdf - 9,535K

Findings

Average Sizes

epub - 8,396K
mobi - 7,717K
pdf - 11,426K

In almost all cases, the epub was the smallest file. Mobi was slightly larger and pdf was the largest. However, the average size of the mobi files were actually smaller overall. This was due to one very large epub file for the HTML5 for .Net Developers book. This book skewed the results since the file was nearly twice the size of the other formats. My best guess is because this file contains many HTML code examples, which may cause problems for the epub format (basically XHTML). Perhaps this is an epub3 format, which supports HTML5 (the book title is a good hint). Again, I did not generate these files, so I am not certain of the reason.

To combat this single anomaly, I decided to remove that book from the averages. When removing the book, the averages of the remaining books looks like so:

Average Sizes (removing HTML5 for .Net Developers - i.e. the anomaly)

epub - 5,703K
mobi - 6,678K
pdf - 11,134K

Take it for what it is worth, but in these findings it suggests that the epub and mobi formats are quite close in size, while the pdf format is nearly double.

Answer to be continued with newer formats and more research.

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