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Originally Posted by =X=
Absolutely, the potential for ePUB is great, but that does not solve today's needs. Right now SONY is the only device that supports ePUB and it is okay compared to it's support for LRF. You just can't make books on the future promise. You have to supply a format that works for your customers.
ePUB is easy to convert, but the formatting is not preserved.
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Wrong, Stanza use ePUB too, and I know for a fact that we distribute dozens of thousands of books to the iPhone every day in this format.
With Stanza on the iPhone, the PRS-505 and PRS-700 there's already more users who can read ePub than LRF.
Quote:
Originally Posted by =X=
As producers of eBook, it is easy generating ePUB and LRF and other formats almost simultaneously, why deny a consumer the choice and give them a sub standard solution, when as producers one can produce equivalent products with little effort.
Hmm I can't speak for earlier sony models but my 505 definitely supports hyphenation as a matter of fact view Peadar's LRF book and you will see some on his second page.
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It is easy converting simple content, but producing nice looking books is a lot more difficult. For example I'm still working on making sure that footnotes are correctly displayed in every format: in PDF I can display them in the footer, in Mobipocket they're just hyperlinks, while in ePub you need to use non-linear flows.
I'm not interested in building a mass-conversion facility like Manybooks, and don't think either that supporting every legacy format on the planet is a good strategy. For me, direct conversions are clearly the sub-standard solution.
Major publishers rely on XML workflows for a very good reason, and I intend to provide something similar for any author minus the complexity.
LRF on the Sony Reader doesn't support hyphenation: I have both a 500 and a 505. I'm not a fan of pseudo-italics either in LRF, I prefer real italics.
In my view, LRF is already a legacy format: none of the e-book retailers in Europe use LRF, they're all 100% ePub based. The situation in the US is quite different because of the lack of support on the 500 and the fact that Sony has already a back catalog in LRF.