Quote:
Originally Posted by murraypaul
You really need to learn to turn your opinions down when posting.
At the moment you come across as shouting down anyone with even a slightly different viewpoint than yours.
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The point is: Alex is right. Let's look at those formats mentioned:
- LIT, MOBI, PDB, PRC, RTF, TXT
It doesn't make sense for Marvin to support any ebook format that can as easily be converted to the de facto standard format epub as these. It would be completely uneconomical. People don't even have to install and use Calibre - there are fairly good online ebook converters; the best one uses Calibre, btw.
- DOC (as in Microsoft Office's format, I presume)
Not many ebooks are distributed in this format (and that's an understatement). In fact, the only DOC-format ebooks I've ever seen were pirated. Nevertheless, there are quite a few solutions to convert DOC files to epub.
If we're talking about Office documents, there are far superior solution to work with them - Apple's Pages (and I'm using it fairly successfully) and quite a few other office solutions.
- IMP: A proprietary, dead format. Nevertheless, there are still quite a few utilities to convert those ebooks if anyone really still has such. Adding dead, proprietary formats to any ebook reader software today would undoubtedly be folly.
- CBR/CBZ: Adding support to Marvin for this might make sense. CBR/CBZ are easy to handle, they are a de facto standard for comics and, AFAIK, there aren't many good readers for them around.
- PDF: PDF is hard to get right and there are a lot of good PDF reading tools for iDevices. So if I were Kris, I'd think long and hard about basically adding a second rendering engine to Marvin.
So, there are two formats that can't be easily converted into epub by anyone. So why should any developer go to any lengths to support such formats? It simply wouldn't make sense. That's what Alex said - in slightly stronger terms maybe - but that's a secondary concern.