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Originally Posted by Liviu_5
Regarding slowness maybe it's just that the epub's I made with Calibre were not that great since Calibre is a work in progress after all - though truly wonderful
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of course any app that brings out new versions practically every day is a "work in progress" and the epub support is officially beta ; it's nonetheless already really good and definitely good enough for personal use (i speak from experience). i don't know how recently you tried it or what sort of file you were reading (novel, rss feed, manga...) but you should definitely check it again. you can also try some of the books in our spanking new epub forum (yay !), some of which have been hand-coded, some of which created with calibre, others using different methods. i've found them to be really nice to read.
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I sort of agree that *eventually* we will move beyond drm, but that *eventually* will involve hard external pressure on the publishers the way p2p forced the music labels hand, and I am not sure where it will come from.
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well, please remember that as a consumer and ebook reader the pressure can come at least partially from *you*. you can write to publishers and tell them you hate drm (and why) and prefer drm-free ebooks. you can vote with your pocketbook, as they say, and support publishers making drm-free books available (there are some already). and i see you live in new york : i hope you've written to the
FTC commission about DRM.
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Before my 770 was Mobi capable, I avoided that format, then I was happy with it, while on the 700 I am happy with lrf for now, but as/if epub matures and tools become better, I have nothing against using it.
When I had the Eb1150, I bought the librarian software and happily converted lots of books to imp so whatever works I use, no "format bias" here.
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that's good news. epub should let you use whatever format you prefer, and also ensure that if you want to re-read your books on a different device, they will still be accessible to you. i'm sure you know that this is not possible with many formats (imp !). this is one of the biggest reasons i'm in favor of epub ; i hate the idea of an ebook being lost to me because it's in a closed, proprietary, and obsolete format. every time i made an imp format book i always kept my source files, for that reason.
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My original skepticism about epub is that I've been hearing these claims of universality for a while, and in the meantime, guess what, Sony came with another proprietary format, Amazon with another pseudo-format (the renamed Mobi with its own drm servers), Ereader is still going strong with FW, Lit is also going strong, only embiid seems to have died and imp is limping unless ETI comes up with a modern Eb1150-like device.
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yes, you are right, there are too many formats currently, and amazon creating yet *another* (closed, proprietary...) one, when they own mobipocket already, is the major reason i wouldn't buy a kindle even if i lived in the US (the other reason being, no epub support, of course.
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that's another reason i think it's important to garner support from all quarters for epub early on, so it will gain momentum
quickly as a standard. the more people adopting it early, the more popular it becomes, the more seriously even the epub-refractories will be obliged to take it, and the closer we really will get to one universal format. it's off to an excellent start already, but every little bit helps.
if you want a robust, future-proof, universal, standard ebook format (and really, how could you not ?), then i think the best way to show that is to start using the one we actually have already, even though it's still in development.