[KevinH]

Hi,

They can all be liberated (yes even secure PDF) with the right python script and now there exists gui front-ends for almost all of these DRM removal tools so simplicity is not even an issue.

The key is which format does the most to keep the original formatting the way it was intended to be while still allowing device scaling (after all this is the Mobile Read forum!)

1. PDF is really not an e-book reader format as far as I am concerned as it doesn't reflow and scale well and really is just a full-screen size format. Its file sizes are also typically too big to work well with mobile devices.

2. Embedding fonts in ereader and mobi is not really doable (and Topaz does not embed fonts, it creates a set of glyphs that are not related or organized in any way like a font) and can't be adjusted by the end user.

3. ereader pdb / pml markup is simply not up to snuff for the more complicated things (drop caps, line spacing, paragraph spacing, etc)

4. mobi internal format is not real html (not even html 3.2) and the file format mobi uses is proprietary and not fully documented (but pretty well-reversed engineered).

So I think epub wins hands down there with the ability to embed fonts if needed - its file format is zip which can easily be opened and the xhtml files are most likely pure html 4.0 with ending tags which can be read in any browser with no changes - so archiving it for the long term is a no brainer as well.

I just wish ADE better supported full justification in the devices which support it.

So epub is superior as an ebook format, the only problem is that Kindle and Mobipocket and others do not support it so if you own one of those devices, you end up having to buy those formats for ease of use (not for their technical merit).

So find those drm removal scripts and use them, and then convert the book to epub / html for long term archiving and then use Sigil and Calibre, and Dropbook, and whatever to get it to the format your ereader likes until some semblance of common sense reaches the book industry and the DRM goes away and a free and open format is then available for all e-readers to use.