Quote:
Originally Posted by daffy4u
What advantages do feel epub has over mobi? For my reading style it doesn't really matter.
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Speaking only for myself, as someone who not only reads Mobi books but also assembles them to read on my Kindle, ePub is a lot easier to work with if you ever want to tweak anything at all. When I reformat my Fictionwise, Smashwords, and Baen stuff, I always start from an ePub base and convert to Mobi.
Mobi is very, very annoying to deal with if you need to change more than the metadata, and it doesn't help that the tools that Amazon officially supplies are kind of buggy.
From a reader's perspective, while the differences aren't all that important for fiction, Mobi is very (and in this day and age, unnecessarily) limited in comparison to ePub for what it can display.
Leaving aside typographical niceties such as drop caps, Mobi also doesn't apply right-hand margins at all. So if, say, your book is quoting a newspaper column and wants to maintain that columnar effect with a narrow facsimile-looking text-block in the center, you can't really do that with Mobi.
On the more functional side, ePub allows for embedded fonts, which enables ePubs on a supporting reader to display additional scripts and therefore quote something like Thai in the middle of English text without resorting to images. Mobi is reliant on whatever font's already installed.
And speaking of images, Mobi has a strict limit of up to 128kb (used to be 64) for any individual image. Anything above that gets forcibly downconverted and the results can be less than attractive (surprise pixelation and whatnot). They all get converted to GIF or JPEG internally, I think.
Whereas with ePub, what you put in is what you see, and you could add in a honking huge full-resolution picture that your reader will downscale on the display and will be pretty useless to you then. But when you go back in a couple more years and make some adjustments so that your book will look good on the new 12-inch e-ink colour whatevers, you'll finally be able to take advantage of having a nice big pic to begin with instead of having it look pitifully zoomed.
But yeah, from an end-user reader-only standpoint, there's probably not much difference to notice if you're not terribly attached to drop caps and varied fonts.
Quote:
Originally Posted by KenJackson
Although I haven't looked into what official software you need to install to decorrupt the file for reading. I doubt they support Linux, so I would probably have to run yet-another piece of proprietary junk software in a Windows VirtualBox.
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They don't, and the Kindle for PC app doesn't work under Wine (you can get it to run and read files, but not register to the account with which you can download DRM-ed books that can be stripped, now that you can no longer do it with the hardware Kindles).
And they used to not support Mac very well, but that's been somewhat improved, and best of all, the liberation tools mostly now work on the Mac, provided you've got an Intel one running 10.5 or better.