Quote:
Originally Posted by RWood
To help me decide what formats to release books in in the future (and perhaps anyone else reading the results) how do you read your ebooks?
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This poll, and the replies posted, show the different problems associated with multiple formats:
- The most popular format, BBeB, is only used by a single device
- Formats come and go, so when you get rid of your device you're stuck with books you can no longer read
- Conversion tools are far from perfect
Here's another less than ideal solution, but it may be promising. Even if conversion tools aren't perfect, there could be a way to improve them by using an xml source format specifically designed for conversion. By analogy, we could refer to Java's "compile once, run anywhere" idea. The end user would take the source text, plug it into a conversion program, and have it come out exactly the way it should look on his device, no tweaking.
I think it's a pity that all those BBeB and Mobipocket files in the Mobileread ebook listing will probably become obsolete soon enough. I wouldn't be surprised if Sony completely abandoned BBeB in favour of ePub.