Quote:
Originally Posted by rcuadro
What do you base this on?
All I use is Kindles so maybe I am not as in tune with the format war but I see mobi and epub as the dominant formats and things like lit have gone in the ways of the Sony MiniDisc
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Mobi & epub are both strong commercially, but the only reason mobi is still strong is because of Amazon's dominance of all things related to book-sales. Epub is a better format by every measure except filesize, and since the difference between 250kb and 750kb is no longer important to the vast majority of readers, it's likely to eventually take over, unless someone finds/makes a new open-source format that can do about what mobi does, and make it readable on 80% or more of the devices available.
Mobi can't do custom line spacing, kerning, drop caps, picture placement of choice, tables (worth a damn), nor a lot of other formatting that people expect from paper books. Ebooks can get the layout almost identical to paper books--which isn't important for leisure reading of novels, but epub can do the formatting necessary for textbooks and tech manuals and mobi can't. In the long run, mobi will lose out to the more versatile format.
I can't remember if mobi still has the sharp limit on pictures; the PDA version required images be below a certain filesize. I don't know if that was built into the format itself, or was just required for PalmOS.