Missgivings..

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Could you elaborate?

Both LIT and MobiPocket are based on the Open eBook (OEB) standard. Both are essentially HTML within a custom "wrapper"; that's why it's so easy to convert from LIT to Mobi, or vice versa. To the best of my knowledge, they have pretty much the same capabilities.

In what way do you consider LIT to be better?

LIT has one thing Mobipocket doesn't, hyphenation support.

[llasram]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Could you elaborate?

Both LIT and MobiPocket are based on the Open eBook (OEB) standard. Both are essentially HTML within a custom "wrapper"; that's why it's so easy to convert from LIT to Mobi, or vice versa. To the best of my knowledge, they have pretty much the same capabilities.

In what way do you consider LIT to be better?

I’m not sure of the exact history, but I believe Mobipocket has been around since before the OEBPS. They’re part of the IDPF and had a say in the standard, but that would mean Mobipocket’s format informed the OEBPS rather than vice versa. So it’s certainly possible to produce a Mobipocket book from an OEBPS book, but it’s a destructive transformation – the original OEBPS book cannot be fully recovered from the Mobipocket book. MSLIT conversion on the other hand appears to be a fully reversible operation.

Three classes of information are lost in Mobipocket books:

• The exact contents of the OEBPS OPF file. Many Mobipocket books sometimes preserve the contents of the ‘metadata’ and/or ‘guide’ elements, but this does not appear to be guaranteed.
• Directory structure, file names, and file separation. Mobipocket generation merges all HTML files into a single unnamed stream. All image filenames are lost, reduced to their PDB record numbers. Any other files which were part of a source OEBPS book are lost.
• Semantic markup and CSS. The Mobipocket HTML renderer is not CSS-based, so Mobipocket conversion destructively translates the OEBPS’s semantic markup plus CSS into purely presentational markup with some proprietary features. All semantic classes are lost. The source CSS is lost. All named anchors are lost, converted to file positions.

Is this actually a problem? I don’t know, but I suspect that it will be easier to convert with cleaner results MSLIT books to future formats than it will be to convert Mobipocket books.

[HarryT]

Thanks for the clarification. None of what you say is a concern to me personally, but I can see that it may be for some purposes.

[bkilian]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Thanks for the clarification. None of what you say is a concern to me personally, but I can see that it may be for some purposes.

And the final thing is that .mobi books use much lower resolution images in general. I much prefer the higher resolution images (especially the covers) included in LIT. Since LIT is essentially an OEBPS package, it's perfect as an archive format, since most converters will take an OEBPS format book.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by bkilian

And the final thing is that .mobi books use much lower resolution images in general. I much prefer the higher resolution images (especially the covers) included in LIT. Since LIT is essentially an OEBPS package, it's perfect as an archive format, since most converters will take an OEBPS format book.

Some tools (eg Book Designer) give you low-resolution images in Mobi books, but books properly created using Mobi Creator do not.

Take a look, for example, at the illustrated Dickens or Austen books that I've posted to this site.

[Hvatum]

Originally Posted by WillAdams

Given that Sony can't even be bothered to make a client which will work on Mac OS X or Linux, one would think they'd be aware of the likelihood of people purchasing the reader, but not buying any books.

Moreover, they've explicitly chosen to support a format (.pdf) which they don't support DRM on.

Also, they don't need to subsidize an on-going cost like the Kindle's wireless network.

So I would hope it'd be okay --- I'm certainly not helping things by not purchasing anything (can't since I don't have a sufficiently up-to-date Windows box)

William

VMWare is the answer. I have a windows XP client that I've had for a few years now. You can get a license pretty cheaply on eBay.

The nice thing is that it will work on any platform VMWare works on. No need to reauthorize DRM stuff on new computers, ever. I have all of my iTunes content in there, as well as my Sony eBook software. Actually I don't think I've even reset the virtual machine for about a month, because you can just pause it and it resumes a few seconds later.

If I move over to Mac OS in a year then that Windows XP install goes with me. Or if I move to Linux for that matter. Also it will run in VM Ware Fusion, virtual machines never become obsolete. Also their motherboards never fail