Switching to a Mac - eBook file formats
A lovingly curated collection of books, references and help files is a staple on a computer used for something a bit more substantial than e-mail and Facebook. Mine is not that large, but covers a variety of file formats, and some of them required a bit of work before being readable on a Mac.
- PDF files-a very common and very portable format, readable out-of-the-box (the Preview app takes care of it).
- CHM (Windows Help) files-a ton of programming languages and libraries documentation is available in this format. It is a favorite of mine for this purpose because of inbuilt index and search ability (that was before various desktop search apps became popular), and because it is a single file (easy to move around and fast to access), as opposed to a thousand-file HTML collection in a folder.
On a Mac, a third-party app is needed to read CHM files. Several free alternatives are available in various states of support-the one looking most recently updated is iChm by Robin Lu. Another option (not tested by me) is ArCHMock. - Microsoft Word .DOC-I don't have Office for Mac (and, having learned that it does not support Hebrew, I won't have it either), but Preview can display old-style (Word 97-2003, which is the most common format for eBooks) Word documents.
- Text files-the most portable format, ever. No wonder Project Gutenberg uses simple text.
- HTML files (saved from the Internet, usually)-Safari.
- Zipped JPGs (Art books, comic books, etc.)-readable out-of-the-box (Archive Utility and Preview), but the unzipped archive needs to be cleaned up. Looking for a cDisplay-like sequential image viewer...
- Audiobooks (MP3, zipped MP3)-no problem, Archive Utility to unzip and iTunes to play.
- DjVu-a relatively rare format, can't be opened out-of-the-box. I have about two books in it, so I didn't bother to install a reader, but MacDjView sounds like a nice option.