Quote:
Originally Posted by speedlever
I'm curious. Are more ebooks available in epub than mobi (Amazon)? Are more books sold in epub than mobi?
Do such statistics exist?
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Two very good questions. I certainly have no special insight, but I'll take a stab.
As to "available", it is (as any Calibre user will tell you) a technical triviality to convert between formats, so any ebook available in one format is (absent artificial barriers) essentially available in all. It is just as technically trivial for any ereader to support any ebook format (again,
cf. Calibre), and there are at least two freely available epub rendering engines that Amazon could drop into its firmware at essentially zero cost.
Which is why, in the absence of technical barriers, industry players have felt compelled to erect artificial ones, in the form of DRM and business-driven decisions over which formats to support. Amazon made a business decision to not support epub (even wrapped in DRM); conversely, my ereader doesn't support mobi simply because there's no compelling business reason for it to -- here in Asia no one's even heard of the Kindle, or .azw[*].
As to "sold", in the US Amazon dominates the ebook market, apparently, so it's pretty easy to guess that .azw is outselling .epub. In the other 95 percent of the world, .azw isn't even an also-ran.
--Nathanael
[*] No longer true. I actually saw a Kindle in Shanghai a week or two ago. It was stuck in a corner, lost in a sea of non-Kindle ereaders, and the salesman didn't seem overly excited about the thing. But there it was. Of course, it could have been a knock-off, rather than the genuine article (I once bough a fake iPhone just a few stalls down; and Shanghai is flooded with imitation iPads; so who knows?).