Quote:
Originally Posted by Liviu_5
My big question is what is the goal of epub?
(...)
The first who knows, it's possible but what do we gain from the current state other than more capabilities in the underground machinery that as a consumer I do not see anyway...
We would still have incompatible formats for various devices since that is not a technical issue but a social one.
Right now we could have all devices reading drm Mobipocket which is probably the easiest to adapt, if the will was there.
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wallcraft has already addressed your question of what is the goal of epub, so i won't elaborate on that. i would add that standard formats are in everyone's best interests because :
- for publishers, it means a simplified workflow as they have only to produce *one* format, which can if necessary be converted to a different end format like mobipocket (even locally by the user), or can be read natively on some devices. this means that it will become easier and cheaper to produce ebooks, which should mean more ebooks being created.
- for bookstores it means simplified inventory management and file serving, since they could conceivably (one day) need to offer only
one format which would be accessible to
all readers.
- for readers, it means a much broader selection of ebooks available to them, either by reading the file natively (currently sony, iphone, soon jetbook, soon others as well) or by easily converting it (currently all mobipocket devices, eb1150...), and the end of ebabel and incompatible formats (again, leaving aside the problem of drm, which is not specific to epub).
- for readers (again) it also means a library of ebooks which is "future proof" ; if epub is a standard format, it means if today you buy a sony and build up a library of epub books you read on it, but next year you buy a different device, your library will still be accessible to you on the new device (which is not the case with closed, proprietary formats like lrf, imp, even mobipocket, etc.). in addition, epub is based on xhtml and css style rules ; this can be displayed by any web browser and a number of other applications.
currently it's true that mobipocket format is very widespread however i would not be satisfied with a mobipocket device ; the mobipocket format may be common but it's also out of date and flawed. css styles used by epub allow for much more complete formatting capabilities. for example, in epub you can "float" images inline with the text, this means you can have an image to one side of the screen with the text flowing along side it. in mobipocket, this is impossible : all images must be inserted in between two blocks of text. you can see three examples of this in the photos in
this post. you can also make drop caps, which is impossible in mobipocket. epub also can use vectorial images (svg) and the capability to incorporate audio or video clips (or pretty much any file you want) already exists and will make for some really interesting multi-media enriched reference texts (for example) as soon as the viewers catch up.
in addition mobipocket uses outdated html code further modified with proprietary mobipocket code. this means that depending on which device / version of the viewer you use the results can be unpredictable. it also means that converting mobi format to another format will not give clean results and will need extensive further work. here is
one explanation of why mobipocket format is inferior to epub. here is
another. there are plenty more but i don't have time to search for them right now.