Thread: azw3 vs mobi vs prc/pdb on a Kindle
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Old 02-08-2016, 07:37 PM   #30
dwig
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Quote:
Originally Posted by eschwartz View Post
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MOBI predated EPUB altogether, and in many ways is just an ancient, lousy format.
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Ancient, yes, but I wouldn't call it "lousy". MOBI was arguably the best of the early ebook formats. It certainly was the best survivor and had a much more desirable feature set than the other dominant format of that era, the Apportis DOC (also known under various later names such as PalmDOC), which was only slightly more advanced that TXT.

MOBI is an early implementation of the original Open EBook specification, which was based on a subset of HTML3.2 and didn't specify a container, only the format of the source documents. MOBI files were compiled into a binary file which allowed them to get past the limitations in the PalmOS's PDB (Palm DataBase) format. EPUB was born as v2 of the OEB spec with a standardized wrapper (specialized ZIP archive). It is based on a newer iteration of HTML with its companion CSS. MOBI did get "out of date" in terms of its feature set.
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