[thorn]

the epub argument seems silly. .mobi's been around for a long time. epub isn't some magical, better format. the nook reads epub. so what. that doesn't mean nook owners can buy ebooks from kobo or from the sony store. the bigger question, is when will *everything* we want to read be available for whichever reader we've decided to adopt, including library borrowing. there are all kinds of german books i'd like to be able to download from german bookseller sites, but there are no kindle editions; and even if i had a sony reader, i wouldn't know whether i'd be permitted to download the book until the moment of attempted purchase, when there's a good chance my purchase would be shut down because of geographical restrictions. because -- why? they want me to buy some translation into english? that ain't happening. i don't read translations of anything i could read in the original.

point being, we all have our specific reading needs/desires *which should be fulfilled*. there are a lot of bigger problems than format. format is invisible to me as a reader. if my device will read it, it'll read it. feedbooks and manybooks allow us to choose our preferred format, as does o'reilly. it's when my device *won't* read something i'd like to read that i start grumbling. i will also grumble if a book i've purchased is suddenly unreadable by any device i have. but i really don't give a special rip about epub, because lack of epub isn't the problem. drm, geographical restrictions, and which formats are readable by devices are the problem.