Quote:
Originally Posted by NVash
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?
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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