.FB2

Introduction

FictionBook is an XML ebook format created in Russia in the early 2000s and widely used in Russian-speaking countries. A book is a single XML file that describes its structure, such as sections, titles, poems and epigraphs, rather than its appearance, leaving the layout to the reading program. Files are often distributed compressed as .fb2.zip.

Structure

An FB2 file is XML with the root element FictionBook in the namespace http://www.gribuser.ru/xml/fictionbook/2.0. The description element holds the title, authors, genre, language and publishing details; one or more body elements hold the text as nested section elements with titles and paragraphs; and binary elements hold the cover and other images, encoded in Base64 and referred to by their ID.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<FictionBook xmlns="http://www.gribuser.ru/xml/fictionbook/2.0"
             xmlns:l="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">
  <description>
    <title-info>
      <book-title>A Short Story</book-title>
      <lang>en</lang>
    </title-info>
  </description>
  <body>
    <section>
      <title><p>Chapter 1</p></title>
      <p>It began on a Tuesday.</p>
    </section>
  </body>
</FictionBook>

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