Quote:
Originally Posted by DiapDealer
Most ebooks that are now being submitted to Amazon have their source files (which is increasingly becoming is an ePub file—by Amazon's own encouragement) embedded in the resulting mobi. Kindlegen does this by default. It would be trivial to modify the reader software to actually read/display the epub that's embedded in the mobi. The ePub is just another record in the mobi binary, after all.
You could take everything a step farther and say that the Kindle would have no need to support DRM'd epubs (specifically ADE) because the epubs will already protected by Amazon's own DRM—on the mobi that they're a part of.
Amazon will be selling DRM'ed mobiePubs... and the "mobi" could eventually be relegated to simply being a DRM container that holds the ePub. 
I don't ever expect them to support DRM'ed ePubs from other retailers on their devices. |
I don't think the embedded source files make it to the customer. It definitely gets embedded in what you submit to Amazon if you use kindlegen, but I am pretty sure it gets stripped off in the workflow that adds it to the store. Otherwise publishers would be complaining loudly about delivery charges due to the larger files, and I don't see that.
Also I compared file size of a book I got from Oreilly with the size of the same book on Amazon. The latter was the same edition and everything but much smaller. I ran a strip script on the Oreilly book and it became about the same size as Amazon's and still contained all the content of the original book. OReilly is probably using Kindlegen, but isn't stripping the content (the script I have is supposed to generate a zip file with the content in it, but I couldn't unzip what it created in this case).