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LRF > other proprietary formats means that LRF is superior to other proprietary formats (by this I mean mobi/azw/prc/pdb, pdf, rtf)
epub > LRF means that epub is superior to LRF.
Sony supports both means that SONY supports the superiors formats and not only that unlike the case of the betamax, these formats are actually more "open", in an operational sense, than the competition.
By superior I mean technically superior.
As for why I think it's superior, PDF and RTF are obviously inferior ebook formats (I know a lot of you love RTF, but that's only because it's old and therefore relatively better supported. Technically, it's crap)
As for the Palm format, I've studied it a little and it was originally designed by one guy to enable him to read ebooks on his ancient CPU limited Palm handheld. Its base design is thus optimized for extremely CPU/memory limited devices. Since then various people, Mobipocket/Amazon being the last, have bolted extra functionality on top of it in a very haphazard manner. Contrast this to the development process that went into the design of LRF and epub, both of which were designed from the ground up to be modern ebook formats.
As for the question of conversion tools. LRF is undoubtedly the best supported at this time. And epub, by its design is very easy to write conversion tools for, so if it ever takes off, I anticipate it being well supported as well.
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