But other than that the text within a chapter flows smoothly without any page breaks. Yes, if you're writing a novel you can put in chapter breaks so each chapter of a novel starts on a fresh page. On an EPUB / MOBI what the person sees is the content of the book in a free flowing stream.
Amazon will refuse an ebook if it realizes it has tables in it if you want to be on the Kindle, make your file table-free. Many EPUB / MOBI readers don't do tables at all, so it's best not to include them for cross-platform compatibility.
WHAT IS A EBOOK PC
This PC reader I'm using does show color, as you can see in the header. Many EPUB / MOBI readers are black and white only, and wouldn't show any color. A chapter might take up 5 "pages" or it might take up 50 "pages" depending on the font size the user chooses, the screen size of their reader, and a variety of other factors. The text flows smoothly throughout a chapter, and the user makes the font larger and smaller as they wish. There are no headers and footers in an EPUB, because there are no set "pages". The right side shows the EPUB / MOBI version. It has a header, a footer, and a table layout.
WHAT IS A EBOOK PDF
The left side shows the PDF version - this is in essence an exact replica of what the physical book page looks like. In the image below, this is the same page from the same book on Low Carb Charts. Let's use an example from one of my books. Here is the difference between a PDF and an EPUB / MOBI, in terms of what a user sees. So in both cases they are specialized formats meant for ebook readers. The Amazon Kindle happens to use a format called MOBI, but really it is just a variant of ePUB. This ePUB format was an ebook format specifically designed for ebook readers. Instead, they used a brand new format, called ePUB. These systems could sometimes show PDFs - but many times they could not. Then came the world of e-readers and tablets. If someone said they had an ebook, it was expected that they had a PDF file which exactly matched the print book's layout and format. For several years the PDF format was the standard for an ebook. A PDF ebook was literally page for page identical to the print copy. The page of a book - complete with headers, footers, page numbering, graphics, and other formatting features, could be perfectly matched on a computer screen. Then came PDF format, and suddenly a new world was opened. Users thought it was very snazzy that a book could be on their computer. There were no fonts, no page breaks, and just a stream of text. In the beginning of the internet, an ebook was simply the text of a book in raw text format on a computer screen.