Quote:
Originally Posted by pilotbob
A standard is generally something (a spec) that is published in some open format with "permission" for anyone to use it. For example, OpenXML is a "standard" even though pretty much only Office 2007 uses it.
BOb
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I do not doubt that technically epub is a "standard", and after all oeb is the standard on which mobi, lit, imp and maybe others were based, but so what...
The claims about epub are that everything will read it, everyone will be able to convert easily to it, and that is what I am quite skeptical about.
We will see but as long as drm is around, everyone will want their proprietary format for obvious reasons. Microsoft did not sell iTunes-drm format songs... we all know the examples, no reason to believe things will change with ebooks.
Trade groups and all-hugs-we-all-get-along work until the advantages of going alone are too high, and for drm that's a given since device lock is a major reason of its existence.
As for plain vanilla unencrypted epub, right now the tools to make nice books lack as does software to reliably read them on various devices. This may or may not change, but right now epub is mostly useless
I still use my 770 and sometimes it's annoying to do a Calibre lrf (700) and a Mobipocket prc (770) for the same book, so I tried to do epub for both and on the 700 it worked but at some cost of speed, while on the 770 it opened, worked for a while and then crashed. So back to lrf's and whatever (prc, opf, html, rtf) for the 770...
When better tools will be around I will be happy to use epub, but for now recommending it as the format of choice is not something I would do.