Quote:
Originally Posted by jaqian
1). Are some formats solely DRM locked?
2). Can formats be converted easily from one to another?
3). What is the benefit of ePUB, Mobi, LRF over each other?
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1) None that you can create. Amazon's Topaz is only sold DRM'd, as was Sony's LRX, but that one's been retired. (There are some other legacy formats that were only sold in DRM'd formats; you can safely ignore their existence.)
2) Depends on what you think "easy" means.
Calibre will convert several ebook formats to several other ebook formats, but how well the formatting is retained depends a lot on the original format & metadata. However, format-conversion in a basic sense, for non-DRM'd ebooks, is not difficult (install software, click "open/import file," save as new format), and the crew here at Mobileread are always happy to offer help with specific cases.
3) I wrote a now-somewhat-outdated
introduction to ebook filetypes a while ago. Right now, a lot of the pros and cons are "what devices read this filetype?" and that's shifting rapidly.
Epub is a very versatile format, with many formatting options. Drawback: many of the devices that read it, don't support all those options. EPub is both a delight and a mess for conversion purposes--it's *easy* to work with, but the options that are supported differently on ever reader & program make it troublesome to get consistent results.
PRC/Mobi's biggest drawback seems to be that it's proprietary; at any time, Amazon could stop supporting it, or make changes to it that make previous books incompatible with software that supports new ones. I don't know if it's got the image-size restrictions that PDB does. Mobi is relatively easy to convert to & from.
LIT works very well on Windows-based machines. It doesn't work at all on non-Windows machines, and it requires Internet Explorer to download the DRM'd ebooks. (LIT has a special niche in ebookishness because it was cracked early and remains easy to crack & convert.)
LRF is now a legacy filetype; Sony's no longer supporting it. It doesn't really matter how good it is (it's fine; its biggest flaw was only being available for Sony readers), because filetypes restricted to a single device-line are pretty much doomed in the marketplace. However, the existing LRFs here at MR are excellent, and look better than most commercially-made ebooks. LRF is hard to convert from. (It takes troublesome software, and formatting may be lost.)