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Old 11-29-2010, 08:02 AM   #18
robtillotson
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Posts: 6
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Join Date: Feb 2010
Device: Nook, Kindle 1
Quote:
Originally Posted by NVash View Post
Thanks for that info bjones6416, but I have another question. I thought Kindle ran on MOBI files. Does it not do MOBI or does it do both? How does that work out?
It does both. Topaz is an Amazon proprietary format that is a hybrid of a scan (for display) and OCR (for text to speech and searching), and the files tend to be a lot bigger than mobi/azw and can't easily be converted to anything else. You can usually tell if a book is Topaz by the free sample, or by noticing that the page on the Kindle store doesn't tell you how big the file is.

As near as I can tell, Topaz is used to allow Amazon to make a Kindle book when the publisher doesn't supply a more appropriate input format. This lets Amazon have books in the Kindle library that no other e-book vendor has, and the amount of work for the publisher is probably a lot less, but on the other hand the quality varies a lot, and the results are even more locked in to the Kindle platform than DRMed MOBIs already are.

--Rob
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