is there an e-book reader that reads epub and mobi

[delphin]

Originally Posted by somebaudy

I'm planning to write e-books in the future. I'd like to know what they look and feel like on a reader.

It feels like Amazon and its format is the elephant in the room and is impossible to avoid.

It also feel like epub gives me access to more bookstores.

So... besides buying a Kindle *and* a reader that reads epub, is there a good and reliable reader out there that I can use to read ebooks.

Is there a way for me to convert the amazon mobi files to epub and read them on an epub reader ?

Thanks in advance

Wasn't going to respond because I figured that after 15 other hits on this thread, it had probably already been hashed out fairly well, but I see that things got a little detoured into the politics of EPUB vs. MOBI.

Some excellent points have been made (I also hope that the world will soon get behind a single unified standard) but let me address the original poster concerns about VALIDATING his e-books against a varity of readers to make sure they are working well across all platforms (something that I wish more comercial publishers would do.)

At a minimum you can validate your EPUBs with several freely available PC applications like Adobe Digital Editions, FBReader, Cool Reader, and the EPUB Reader Plugin for Firefox.

For portable devices, some of the above, such as FBReader and Cool Reader, are also available as apps for Android (if your Android Tablet doesn't have the full market, you can still install them by grabbing the .APK file directly from the .org websites above).

Another absolutely ESSENTIAL tool is Sigil, which not only lets you author original EPUBs, but also lets you perform fairly sophisticated validation checks on the overall structure of the EPUB, as well as validating the XML/HTML formating of the internal files.

For Amazon's proprietary MOBI files, you are pretty much locked into Kindle if you want to validate their appearance on Amazons platform. You can get some assurance by viewing them on a PC with Amazon's Kindle for PC App, or on an Android tablet with Amazon's Kindle for Android App, but if you want to be absolutely certain how they will render on a real Kindle 3 or newer device, then you should probably bite the bullet and get real Kindle devices for testing.

As far as easy format coversions from MOBI to EPUB go (and back), nothing beats Calibre.

I recently got an inexpensive 7 inch Android 2.3 tablet (Viewpad 7e) and was amazed at the options available. This tablet doesn't have full Android Market registration out of the box (though you can hack it in fairly easily) but even without 'rooting' it comes with Kindle for Android pre-installed, and you can easily add B&N's Nook for Android, as well as FBReader, Cool Reader, and several others, from either 1MobilMarket or Amazon's Android App market (both of which come pre-installed as alternatives to Google's full Android Market).

Nice as it is to have a half dozen or more nice book readers at your fingertips in one compact tablet device, if I was was planning commercial distribution of my EPUBS, I wouldn't rely solely on the Android versions, and would still do secondary validation using Sigil and the PC based versions of several e-readers (most of them are free, and it takes only a few minutes to load up your book and look at it on several platforms).

You can find lots of support for virtually all the above applications here on mobileread.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by delphin

For Amazon's proprietary MOBI files, you are pretty much locked into Kindle if you want to validate their appearance on Amazons platform. You can get some assurance by viewing them on a PC with Amazon's Kindle for PC App, or on an Android tablet with Amazon's Kindle for Android App, but if you want to be absolutely certain how they will render on a real Kindle 3 or newer device, then you should probably bite the bullet and get real Kindle devices for testing.

Not so. As I've already pointed out earlier in the thread, Amazon's freely downloadable "Kindle Previewer" app will allow you to see exactly what your book will look like on any Kindle device or app. It uses exactly the same rendering engine that the actual device or app does, and will precisely reproduce all the "quirks" that each one has.

It's a free download for both Windows and Mac from:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?docId=1000234621

[delphin]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Not so. As I've already pointed out earlier in the thread, Amazon's freely downloadable "Kindle Previewer" app will allow you to see exactly what your book will look like on any Kindle device or app. It uses exactly the same rendering engine that the actual device or app does, and will precisely reproduce all the "quirks" that each one has.

It's a free download for both Windows and Mac from:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?docId=1000234621

That's a great suggestion, and certainly worth pursuing, but I wonder if Amazon has bothered to keep this tool up to date now that they actually have several platforms.

As you know, the original Kindles used a proprietary embedded Linux implementation, where the new Kindle Fire is Android based.

Most Linux code is programed in "C", and though there are other options, all Linux compilers comply with basic Linux POSIX API standards.

Nearly all Android code is written in Googles simplified variant of Open Java with Androids unique API and Libraries.

I am sure that in both the Kindle Fire and original K3, the 'rendering engine' code is written to the same internal Amazon spec, but there are LOTS of EPUB devices which implement the same 'open standard', which none the less show some differences when rendering the exact same EPUB document.

Do you know for a fact that Amazon has updated the Kindle Previewer to include a separate Java based rendering engine which is an exact representation of their Android based rendering used in the Kindle Fire? (along with their older presumably 'C' coded Kindle engine)

If not, one work around would be to use the Kindle for Android app on a 16:9 Android Tablet (or a real Kindle Fire) to preview the current and future Android based Kindles, and rely on their PC Kindle Preview App to approximate the older 4:3 proprietary coded Kindles.