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MrPLD: Amazon has already stated that they will never support Epub unless absolutely forced to. They firmly believe that to release control of their format and allow you to view any kind on your Kindle reader would immediately free you to go elsewhere for books, and they absolutely will fight to the tooth to prevent that from happening. The thing is, in time they will either have to do that, or die. What they don't realize is that numerous other companies have done this in the past, and as soon as people realize they're a monopoly, which I think a lot of people are waking up to, their monopoly is going to implode anyways. But it's going to be a long, hard, painful road until then. Trust me, we've been fighting against similar monopolies in the tech world for the past 30 some years, a few of which refuse to die and always seem to find some unique way to remain as a monopoly, despite repeated attempts to unseat them.
Freeshadow: I agree. The problems with the way epub displays is not the fault of the format. If you look at properly displayed epub, it's equal to Mobi, or better in some ways. The problem is, just like with every other open source format out there, nobody wants to properly support them because they don't take epub seriously. You also have the problem of cheap vs expensive. The high end readers see free and open formats as a threat to their business (which is a flat out lie propagated by the proprietary format vendors!) because they feel that anyone who is allowed to use an open format will be free to move around anywhere they want, which threatens their business. So they prefer proprietary lock-in via proprietary formats, DRM and the like, and either avoid epub, or make it the lesser stepchild that's not worth your time bothering with. There's also the problem that all the low end vendors who openly embrace epub are too bloody cheap to put any kind of effort into properly displaying epub files on their readers because cheap is everything.
So in the grand picture, there's a LOT of things working against high quality output or universal and proper adoption of epub, and most of it involves money, which is something I've actually gotten quite used to having to deal with in the foss world. IE, money constantly being the driving issue behind the war of open vs proprietary.
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