Quote:
Originally Posted by jocampo
Delphin,
there is no good or bad ebook format and not because I like Kindle the ePub is bad or viceversa. What people needs to understand that the real issue here is DRM, not Amazons or Kindle.
And not sure why you're saying that converting via Calibre is a hassle, it usually takes 60 seconds or so. All my books are computer books, with lot of graphics, SQL code, etc, and I've never had any problem converting from ePub to mobi of mobi to ePub....never...ever...
Calibre conversion takes some CPU resources so I would not blame your issue to the format itself but your machine's resources. It is a simple and easy process on modern PCs.
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Whether there is such a thing as a 'good' and 'bad' format is debatable, but I do think that one thing that history shows pretty clearly is that eventually there are winners and losers.
I think MOBI and AZW are posed to go the way of the Dodo bird when the upcoming EPUB 3 feature set is fully implimented.
EPUB 3 includes JavaScript support which will allow the creation of 'smart books'.
Stories with interactive elements, technical books which can perform calculations, reference books with intelligent search features - the list goes on and on.
Publishers will have to support smart books in EPUB format, because that's what everyone else in the world other than Amazon uses, and with the complexity of creating a scripted 'smart books' being so much higher than a simple non-scripted title, publishers will want to stay with a single format.
Also after EPUB matures a little and there is a much larger base of free open source code with non-restrictive licenses that Amazon can STEAL like they did with the Linux OS used in Kindle, then I suspect that most of their objections to EPUB will vanish.
After all, they can still lock-in the suckers with proprietary DRM like Apple right?
As far as your comments about software performance vs. PC resources, you're joking right???
The same Netbook that you implied lacks 'resources', the one that often takes 15 minutes or more to perform a simple ebook conversion, can handle real time 720p HD video playback pretty smoothly.
So let's look at that -
1280 x 720 x 32bits/pixel x 30fps is just over 110.5 MEGABYTES of video data being processed and displayed EVERY SECOND.
The simple Atom chipset used in my machine lacks the fancy dedicated video decoding hardware found in some modern Intel and AMD offerings, so it has to get by on RAW CPU HORSEPOWER for all video decoding.
I have worked on video codec code, and trust me on this, a complex video codec like XVID or H264 does magnitudes more complex calculations than those involved in simple text and html format conversions.
I have enormous respect for the author of Calibre. It's not his fault that some of the conversion libraries he currently has available don't perform better, but this fact doesn't give me any illusions about Calibre's ebook conversion performance which is quite honestly pretty PATHETIC.
Yes, I understand that in practical terms, the answer to badly performing software is often to simply buy faster hardware.
I do have a nice quad core 3.5 GHz Athalon desktop machine that I imagine could crank through the same conversion in minute or two, but I prefer the Netbook for downloading, managing, and converting ebooks.
I have no need or desire to replace my Netbook with a faster model, as it's adequate for nearly everything else, and truth be told can live with this delay.
Doesn't mean I have to like it though.
