Mobipocket dominance?

[acidzebra]

Originally Posted by HarryT

I've been reading books in Mobi format for a lot longer than 5 years already, so I don't see any particular reason it shouldn't last me another 5 years.

"I've been whipping these here buggy horses with a $BRANDNAME whip for 5 years, I don't see why I shan't be whipping these here buggy horses with $BRANDNAME whip in 5 years time!"
- some guy on the cusp of the invention of the automobile.

I'm sorry, I couldn't resist. Seriously, who knows? All I am trying to say is times change, and save for ASCII text I can't think of any format that has stuck around since I first started fiddling with computers.

[Lemurion]

Harry's stance makes sense to me: if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

If a format and reader works, keep with it.

[Over]

Originally Posted by acidzebra

"I've been whipping these here buggy horses with a $BRANDNAME whip for 5 years, I don't see why I shan't be whipping these here buggy horses with $BRANDNAME whip in 5 years time!"
- some guy on the cusp of the invention of the automobile.

Yet, people still ride horses in these days... Many times, new creations don't replace older technology. They just add options.

[kovidgoyal]

Originally Posted by Lemurion

Harry's stance makes sense to me: if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

If a format and reader works, keep with it.

By that argument the discussion of the relative merits of formats is itself pointless, since every format "ain't broke".

[pdurrant]

I use Mobipocket for historical reasons - it was the best option when I started out on a Sony Clie SJ-10.

It would require some significant development to make me switch formats now, although I'm sure that at some point in the future I'll switch to a new format.

By that time I suspect there will be very simple tools for converting from Mobipocket to the new format, as Mobipocket is, essentially, just a wrapper around an HTML dialect.

I wouldn't be surprised to lose my dictionary. But that's one book out of hundreds, probably thousands by that time.

As for DRM - before this year, I last bought a DRMed eBook in 2004. And I'd bought less than 10 at that time. But since a Mobipocket DRM removal tool became available this year, I've bought over 100.

Unencrypted Mobipocket is future proof, as well as having a nice reader for most platforms. Now that there's Stanza available for non-DRM Mobipocket on Mac OS X I'm even happier with my choice.

Paul

Originally Posted by mrdini

I look forward to hearing what people have to say regarding mobipocket :P

[acidzebra]

Originally Posted by Over

Yet, people still ride horses in these days... Many times, new creations don't replace older technology. They just add options.

a) it was just a joke
b) seriously, what % of people gets on their horse every morning to ride to work? How is "horseback" doing as a serious mode of personal transport? Horseback riding is entertainment to most people doing it. Cars didn't "add options" - they transformed the way people live.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

By that argument the discussion of the relative merits of formats is itself pointless, since every format "ain't broke".

But what format would you regard as "better" than Mobi, Kovid?

There's a lot of hype around at the moment about EPUB, but it seems to be distinctly "broken" at the moment on the Sony Reader, with a maximum size limit of the length of text that it will handle.

What formats other than Mobi support dictionary lookup? That's very important to me.

[tompe]

Originally Posted by HarryT

What formats other than Mobi support dictionary lookup? That's very important to me.

It is the reader program that supports dictionary lookup and it has nothing to do with the format. It would be easy to extend FBReader to support for example Stardict dictionaries.

[HarryT]

The format has to include a specification for dictionaries, however, which is distinct from that of "normal" books. The only dictionary formats I'm personally aware of are those for Microsoft Reader and MobiPocket. There are no dictionaries, for example, for PDF or BBeB books.

[tompe]

Originally Posted by HarryT

The format has to include a specification for dictionaries, however, which is distinct from that of "normal" books. The only dictionary formats I'm personally aware of are those for Microsoft Reader and MobiPocket. There are no dictionaries, for example, for PDF or BBeB books.

Not for lookup. It would be possible to implement lookup for pdf files. Stardict format is an open format for dictionaries. I am very happy with the free dictionaries available in this format for my N810. And any reader could be extended to lookup words in a Stardict dictionary.

[HarryT]

Are commercial dictionaries (Oxford, Collins, Chambers, Websters, etc) available in the Stardict format? I have no problem with "free" dictionaries, but I don't think they can compete with those produced by professional lexicographers.

[llasram]

Originally Posted by HarryT

But what format would you regard as "better" than Mobi, Kovid?

Assuming you don't mind others than Kovid answering...

I definitely consider EPUB an exceptionally good format, and wrote my reasons for so thinking in a post on another thead. Versus Mobipocket in particular, EPUB supports fixed-width fonts, effectively unconstrained image filesizes (<10MB in ADE), and arbitrarily complex vector graphics. But my biggest gribe with Mobipocket is it's proprietary presentational markup. It produces problems on both the content generation and display end.

On the generation end, publishers are not creating Mobipocket's markup directly, but generating it with tools which accept HTML+CSS (OEBPS/OPS) and produce Mobipocket-compatible HTML. Such conversion introduces the possibility of bugs, and I have multiple Mobipocket books where the intent of the source markup is clear despite the particular structure of the generated markup resulting in a different rendering.

On the display end, the use of proprietary markup makes it difficult to identically display Mobipocket markup. Adhering to no published standard, the "correct" way to display Mobipocket markup is how ever the viewers written by Mobipocket display it. This makes future accurate rendering of texts currently in Mobipocket questionable.

Originally Posted by HarryT

There's a lot of hype around at the moment about EPUB, but it seems to be distinctly "broken" at the moment on the Sony Reader, with a maximum size limit of the length of text that it will handle.

(a) The limitation is not in total book-length, but in "chapter" length, which involves a perhaps arbitrary page-break at the "chapter" transition. (b) This is most definitely not a limitation of EPUB itself, but of the Adobe DE reader on the Reader.

Originally Posted by HarryT

What formats other than Mobi support dictionary lookup? That's very important to me.

None, but any could with the necessary software & interface in place. If you mean what format other than Mobipocket supports dictionary-lookup into a book, then yeah -- only Mobi AFAIK.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by llasram

On the display end, the use of proprietary markup makes it difficult to identically display Mobipocket markup. Adhering to no published standard, the "correct" way to display Mobipocket markup is how ever the viewers written by Mobipocket display it. This makes future accurate rendering of texts currently in Mobipocket questionable.

One thing I like about Mobi is that fact that so much of the "presentation" is down to the viewer. On the Gen3 I have a free choice of what font and at what size to read my book, and whether to display the text left or fully justified. On other versions of the Mobi viewer I can additionally change such things as the margin size. I am a great believer in having the minimum amount of markup within the book itself - except in cases where it's absolutely required - and allowed the reader to make his or her own choice of all the display parameters.

[pdurrant]

This is a very good point.

I feel that eBooks should always be done in a way that allows user choice of the base font, font size and even justification for most of the text.

Many designers like to specify things far too tightly for my liking.

On the other hand, there are some formatting things that Mobipocket doesn't handle. Drop caps, for example, or decorated capitals. In-line illustrations are also a bit hit & miss.

We're really just at the very start of the eBook era. Current eBook readers are like the personal computers of the late 70s and early 80s - still very much in development, with many different specifications and formats, and still with lots of improvement in store. If they follow the pattern of personal computers, we should see a standard or two emerge from the crowd over the next five years.

I fully expect that by 2020 we'll have inexpensive (costing less than ten new hardbacks), robust full-colour eBook readers of many sizes, which will read epub format eBooks...

...which will almost certainly be able to read (non-DRM) Mobipocket books as well. (Dragging myself back on-topic at the last minute.)

Paul

Originally Posted by HarryT

One thing I like about Mobi is that fact that so much of the "presentation" is down to the viewer. On the Gen3 I have a free choice of what font and at what size to read my book, and whether to display the text left or fully justified. On other versions of the Mobi viewer I can additionally change such things as the margin size. I am a great believer in having the minimum amount of markup within the book itself - except in cases where it's absolutely required - and allowed the reader to make his or her own choice of all the display parameters.

[llasram]

Originally Posted by HarryT

One thing I like about Mobi is that fact that so much of the "presentation" is down to the viewer.

Most of this -- and much more, actually -- could be done in EPUB with a user CSS overlay. It would provide the best of both worlds, allowing book designers to specify their desired formatting in detail while letting heathen plebian readers override it with their own hideous settings .

The only place which is chancy is fonts, but the reason impacts Mobipocket as well. No "real" font family includes glyphs for the entire Unicode character set, nor is reasonable to expect that the default fonts for a reader system will cover all of Unicode. This ultimately makes it necessary for a "complete" e-book format to support embedding fonts containing Unicode ranges not part of the standard font-set (which I should add to my "EPUB vs. Mobipocket" list). This combines with user-selected fonts only so long as the reader system can fallback to the designer-selected/default font when the user-selected font doesn't contain a glyph for a particular character. E.g. Web browsers already do this, but it doesn't always give the most attractive results when the user-selected font and designer-selected font don't mix well.