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>>1. EPub is a more advanced format, so there's no degredation that I'm aware of going from mobi to EPub. At least all my mobipocket books converted fine.
Amazon's modified mobi is a completely adequate format for ebooks. I've converted plenty of ePubs over to mobi with no loss in quality.
>>2. Converting 700 000 books would take Amazon a few hours. Their E2C Elastic Compute Cloud (Which they offer as a product) could easily convert more than 30 million books every day. (Even as a private individual you can hire 1000 powerfull servers from them for a few hours without prior notice if you feel like it ... they DO have the computing power to do this easily).
I don't know anything about that so I'll take your word that the actual computer time isn't significant.
>>3. A lot of the books are not proofread by anyone, just dumped into the Amazon store by publishers. When customers complain about missing pages and unreadable books, responsibility is shifted to the publisher. Amazon is not a publisher, they take 30% or something for providing a shopping cart and alot of market power. And this is my whole point, someone writes the books in the first place and if that's EPub then all books would have been of a higher quality.
Someone still has to check that the conversions went through okay. You can't mass convert 700,000 mobi files to epubs and then simply throw them back up on the site. And I dispute that books will be of higher quality just for being ePubs. I've seen no evidence that ePubs as currently published have any significant quality advantage over mobi files.
Whatever advantage ePub might have over mobi isn't currently being exploited as far as I can see.
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