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Old 03-29-2012, 10:18 AM   #32
djulian
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Posts: 408
Karma: 1786912
Join Date: Nov 2010
Device: Kindle Voyage
Quote:
Originally Posted by ATDrake View Post
Long story short: the Mobipocket format is not only proprietary and poorly documented, it's also very limited in its display features and functionality (no right-hand margins! text can't wrap around pictures and must start on a new line below! images size limited to 128kb which often results in nasty pixelated downconversion for maps in the front of fantasy novels!) in a way that reduces a lot of books to a very low typographical level of simple text display.

Much basic fiction probably isn't impacted very much by that, but it does make for a very bare-bones reading experience when it could be something much nicer, cf. MR member zelda_pinwheel's nifty illustrated version of Three Men in a Boat, which has some nice screenshots in the thread showing how simple basic ePub features (actually just plain HTML features, really) can make a tremendous visual impact in aesthetic terms.

And certain kinds of non-fiction are affected detrimentally, such as poetry and reference because Mobi doesn't handle indents or any but the most basic types of lists and tables very well.

The one thing it does have going for it is a standardized dictionary format that anyone can create their own lookup dictionaries for any language in, and that's really the best thing about Mobi, IMHO, which I wish the ePub people would get around to addressing.

Also, personally I find it's rather annoying to take apart and reconstruct to fix the inevitable typos and formatting errors that riddle just about every e-book and ePub is simply so much easier to deal with that simply I no longer consider Mobi format books worth buying when there's an ePub version available.


Those pictures (from Three Men in a Boat) are remarkable! I have never seen anything like that in an Amazon book. I love the Kindle as a device, but I'd like to see some formatting like what zelda_pinwheel put together.
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