Quote:
Originally Posted by Katsunami
ATDrake, what is your reason to prefer an epub source?
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A number of reasons, not least of which is the fact that ePub is actually an official standard which is decently documented and can be made/tweaked with standard tools and displayed on anyone's compatible software instead of relying upon what Amazon gives or people are able to reverse-engineer.
But I really do prefer the neat way that ePubs are laid out in zip packages and can be edited a chapter at a time if I need to fix some really bad typos (assuming the maker didn't dump the entire book into a single text file) or add a table of contents with flickable chapter marks. It's simply so much easier to work with if I have to alter anything at all, including the metadata.
Also, I buy a lot of stuff which is either the same price or considerably cheaper if I get it from another source than Amazon, such as Fictionwise's DRM-free MultiFormat offerings, which have a number of backlist works reprinted by e-publishers which can be discounted considerably using the weekend coupons. Sometimes Kobo also works out to cheaper pricing with their own more sporadic discount coupons.
And I buy things directly from the author/publisher as well, and many of them who sell direct from their sites provide a Mobi version that's been generated from an ePub or Word document by Calibre (which shows up in the metadata), so I might as well get a format that's closer to the source, so to speak.
Also, potentially future-proofing.
I have a Kindle now, I might have something else as my primary reader in the future. The less I have to strip and convert later, the happier I'll probably be, especially as Amazon occasionally does things to mess up the available DRM removal tools, which is easier for them to do because they control the format and the devices it goes to, and they've done it at least twice that I know of since I first got my Kindle.
B&N and Adobe can't mess with their setup nearly as easily, as it's been licensed to other device makers and thus harder to make more arbitrary changes to.
And of course my primary preference is for DRM-free MultiFormat to begin with, just to bypass all of this when possible. But I usually still download the ePub and convert to Mobi, because sometimes I don't like the default Calibre settings people having been using (putting the HTML TOC at the end of the book, for instance) and can also get the tightest compression and save space on my Kindle's puny 1.4 GB available space with custom settings in KindleGen.