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I think it's a mistake to think of epub as the standard. True it is "a" standard since it has all the things required to make a standard. But the mobi format has been around a lot longer than epub.
I think the first big thing in popularizing e-reading was the Palm and there the de facto standard was .doc. Of course that was meaningless as a standard since it was only an extension and didn't define a format, but there was a format commonly associated with it and used by 90% of ebooks. Mobi and epub were developed not so much as a way of standardizing but as a way of including such things as italics and bold text, which the common .doc format didn't support.
The real standard is what people commonly use and today that's mobi and it's variations. In the past it was the common and simple doc format. Epub has never really been a standard in the sense that most people use it.
I'm all for a standard format and I hope that happens someday but I don't see any signs that it might happen soon.
Barry
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