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Originally Posted by Elfwreck
Insider is fine; just checking on source. Knowing it's an insider means we can understand that the concept may be very nebulous--Adobe may not have specific plans yet, or they might but the info being released might be deliberately vague.
I must agree with Harry that there's no reason to make a format "more like mobi," considering its limitations when compared to ePub. While simpler formats have been and could be commercially successful, I believe that it could only compete *today* if it were easy to convert to & from ePub, and if ePubs converted to the new format didn't get scrambled or lose data, regardless of how complex they are.
I'm not sure what features would be relevant to the discussion. Obviously, a good ebook format should allow common types of formatting: bold, italic, underlining; a few different font sizes; left, right, centered & justified text; indents, super & subscript, and so on.
Font embedding may be necessary to be competitive. Image placement control, also; text needs to be able to wrap close to the image at least. Indexed locations would be good. Good metadata support. I'm sure there's a long list of other features & formatting options that would be necessary.
The real issue wouldn't be how good the format is, but what software it takes to read, edit & create it, and how widespread support for that would be. A new ebook format released like PDF originally was--needing proprietary software to read, later loosened to proprietary software to create--would bomb horribly; there are too many open-source options available. A new ebook format that had widely open support (whether or not it's technically proprietary) could compete--but would quickly be competing with amateur efforts.
There's not much ePub doesn't do that we'd want from ebooks. (I can think of a few things, but I doubt that's what Adobe's going to focus on.) There are plenty of devices that don't support all that ePub can do; no new format is going to fix that problem.
Unless Adobe's going to offer its software as an easy "reflash your kindle to this, and you can read our files AND still keep your connection with your Amazon account!"... it's not likely to get very far.
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I think we all agree that epub is the better format, but Kindle sales are rocking the market, so maybe something that encompasses both camps would be preferable for them. I think however, their focus is on readers and not writers.