Quote:
Originally Posted by Sella174
...having to learn ePub to generate mobi is kind of silly. ...
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It doesn't if you know where ePub and Mobi came from. They are both descendants of the same original standard.
Both are outgrowths of the Open Ebook initiative which gave birth to a range of formats. It was a "standard" for creating ebooks that dealt with the creation side only and left the final "packaging" to each member to decide for themselves. These formats were much richer than the text based formats (TXT, AportisDOC, PeanutDOC, PalmDOC, ...) that had existed. MobiPocket, a French company whose delivery format was MOBI, was the most successful of these in the long run, though there were others that were successful for a while.
The standards group morphed while developing version 2 and added a packaging format to the standard. That format is ePub, and its based on a variant of HTML 4.1. The v2 version of the standard is why the primary ePub format is v2 with the recent tweak being v3, which incorporates a number of HTML5 functions.
There was no single v1 and no "ePub v1", though MOBI is a member of the v1 family and is based on a subset of HTML 3.2. When Amazon, whose core has been as a bookseller since the beginning, decided to add ebooks they followed their usual habit of acquiring the needed expertise rather than developing everything from scratch. They bought MobiPocket.
The old Open Ebook development standards worked from HTML files using a subset of 3.2. Amazon has advanced the format using newer HTML versions through several variants, most of the newer ones being tagged as AZW variants. They also replaced the old MobiPocket tools with more modern tools that now use formatted ePub files rather than a loose collection of HTML files as "source" material.