View Single Post
Old 01-13-2012, 11:12 AM   #5
Oldpilot
Groupie
Oldpilot plays well with othersOldpilot plays well with othersOldpilot plays well with othersOldpilot plays well with othersOldpilot plays well with othersOldpilot plays well with othersOldpilot plays well with othersOldpilot plays well with othersOldpilot plays well with othersOldpilot plays well with othersOldpilot plays well with others
 
Posts: 184
Karma: 2572
Join Date: Aug 2010
Device: Kindle
For all practical purposes, the mobi platform (which underlies Kindle) predates epub. In 2007, Sony and most other ebook readers used proprietary formats.

I use html to create Kindle books, which outsell Nook and all other venues many times over. As time permits, I then open the html in Sigil and use it to build an epub for Barnes & Noble. I no longer bother with Sony or Apple, let alone any of the others, which don't sell enough books to justify the time involved. (Amazon's UK store alone sells more books for me than Barnes & Noble does, and B&N sells more than all the rest combined.)

Both Kindle/mobi and Nook/epub are at bottom html documents. The only real difference I see between them is that the former wants a single file while the latter wants a file for every chapter or section.

I am accustomed to using CSS for web pages but have yet to master an included CSS file for Sigil. Since with KF8 standard, CSS will also be useful for building Kindle books, I suspect this is again a merging of the two standards. I notice for example that the Kindle Guidelines http://kindlegen.s3.amazonaws.com/Am...Guidelines.pdf no longer require the unique Mobi page break (actually a chapter break) of <mbp:pagebreak /> but instead suggests a CSS instruction. I wonder if that will also work on Sigil?

Really, for this year and the foreseeable future, Amazon owns the ebook market. For me it represents 80 percent of all my digital sales. It appears that B&N may be selling off the Nook franchise, and that I think would be a very good thing, since it would free the Nook from reliance on the B&N store. An independent Nook might be able to absorb some of the smaller players in this field, hence get closer to becoming a Kindle alternative.

A year ago the chatter was that Google Books was going to eat Amazon's lunch. I don't know ANYBODY who has ever sold a Google edition. Apple is a bit better, but not by much. Apple evidently is only interested in selling hardware; it couldn't care less about its ibookstore.

(JMHO, of course!)

(Sorry about the stupid icon in the middle of the pagebreak. I see no way to get rid of it.)
[MOD: You need to check the "Disable smilies in text" checkbox. Done for you.]

Last edited by pdurrant; 01-15-2012 at 06:51 AM.
Oldpilot is offline   Reply With Quote