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wallcraft · 11-25-2007, 01:57 PM

It does appear to be the case that AZW and MOBI are the same format. The difference is that a secure AZW file is locked to a single Kindle, but a secure MOBI can be read by up to 4 devices. Most publishers are not producing e-books exclusively for the Kindle, and if they have an AZW version then there is no extra work in producing a MOBI version.

So in the short term, I expect the range of MOBI e-books to increase and for the price of all e-books to go down. MOBI will probably be on average a bit more than AZW, but they are less restricted.

The folks who are being screwed are the Kindle owners, who can't buy DRMed books from anyone but Amazon. However, they can hardly say that Amazon has not made that very clear up front. The backlash is likely to come a couple of years from now when Kindle owners are looking for a new e-book reader and "discover" that their e-books are not transferable.

11-25-2007, 01:57 PM	#13
wallcraft reader Posts: 6,977 Karma: 5183568 Join Date: Mar 2006 Location: Mississippi, USA Device: Kindle 3, Kobo Glo HD	It does appear to be the case that AZW and MOBI are the same format. The difference is that a secure AZW file is locked to a single Kindle, but a secure MOBI can be read by up to 4 devices. Most publishers are not producing e-books exclusively for the Kindle, and if they have an AZW version then there is no extra work in producing a MOBI version. So in the short term, I expect the range of MOBI e-books to increase and for the price of all e-books to go down. MOBI will probably be on average a bit more than AZW, but they are less restricted. The folks who are being screwed are the Kindle owners, who can't buy DRMed books from anyone but Amazon. However, they can hardly say that Amazon has not made that very clear up front. The backlash is likely to come a couple of years from now when Kindle owners are looking for a new e-book reader and "discover" that their e-books are not transferable.