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a standard format means a lot more than just being common. it means interoperability and continued developpement. it means a much stronger guarantee of future access to your files, particularly in the case of epub which is an open format based on xhtml and can therefore be read on any web browser even if you don't have a device of any kind.
mobipocket is admittedly relatively common for the moment, but that is already changing in europe, where very few new publishers are using it, the majority overwhelmingly are choosing to support epub.
that aside, the fact that it is a closed, proprietary format means that despite its current popularity it's not a very good archival format (i realise this is not important to you since you consider ebooks more or less expendable commodities, but not everyone feels that way), and it's not very futureproof.
in addition, even for novel-reading (which is the bulk of my library), the mobipocket format has some rather serious structural flaws and is inferior to the epub format in terms of formatting possibilities, meta-data possibilities, evolution possibilities, accessibility... and although it's a common format, it's not evolving at all ; mobipocket developpement has been at a standstill for years despite the many known bugs.
since epub can be converted to be read on any mobipocket device which doesn't support it natively, i can't see why anyone would prefer to *start* with that format.
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