Difference between MOBI and AZW3

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by DaltonST

Amazon supports .mobi because if they did not, they would be sued by everyone who bought .mobi books for use by MobiPocket at http://www.mobipocket.com/ many years ago, including me. I read them on my PalmOS devices, plus my Win98/Me PCs.

Amazon bought MobiPocket, and also the .mobi format, so they would have little competition when they got into selling ebooks. Amazon did everything it could get away with to kill off .mobi in favor of its own formats.

The Federal Trade Commission would have viewed their actions as anti-competitive and on the road towards monopolistic if they had dropped support for .mobi.

Personally, I converted my .mobi books to epubs (via Calibre) years ago.



DaltonST

You're hysterically funny.

Amazon sold MOBI for quite some time, and they still do in fact.

They bought MOBI in order to have their own format they could control.

I find it hard to see why the FTC would view it as anticompetitive, for a compaany to stop supporting their own books. If anything, immense competition would result.

Why would people who bought MOBI books from a different company be any more likely to complain than the peoplewho bought MOBI books from Amazon?

Pardon me, but do you know ANYTHING about Kindles?

[eschwartz]

Ooh, it looks like this thread is also a necropost...

[speakingtohe]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Before you dump embedded fonts, you really need to stop and make sure the fonts are not needed. Like sometimes the fonts are embedded so the correct characters are displayed because the default font doesn't do it. Also, sometimes the embedded fonts are used to offset/highlight something and that you lose that if you remove them. There are more reasons for embedded fonts then just to display a certain font.



Sometimes those display issues can be fixed with some simple CSS editing. Calibre's eBook editor will allow you to fix up those eBooks so they will look good on a Kobo Reader. The best way to do it is to have a look at the CSS and XML before another conversion and see how easy it might be to fix things.

In the particular case I am referring to I had quite a few old books that were lrf and lit format originally.

I did indeed view the CSS and was/am quite comfortable doing that.
Most of these books, if not all, had ordinary line spacing, but all displayed as quadruple LS or worse on the Kobo. Fine on the Sonys or reader apps.

They all had long number of decimal places in the font sizes and I could usually make them work on the kobo by changing all the font sizes from x.xxxxxx to x.x or x.xx.

But many books had a lot of unique font sizes. maybe as many as 40. Changing them could take hours each. Well one hour anyway. Changing all of the font sizes to 1 for example would make them readable but less than nice. Itried editing the html for spacing but that was a nightmare.

Now I know this is bad practice , but these were old books , some I had had for 20 years probably. From PD or cd's etc.

I could have read them on my Sonys, but I had just bought the HD and wanted to use it. I could have redownloaded most of them and got better copies, but there were quite a few.

SO I tried converting to different formats and back and instant success with mobi

The conversion to mobi changed the font sizes to small, large etc. and while not exactly the same, you would have to be very nitpicky to tell the difference as these were older versions without many bells and whistles.

Newer B&N books behaved the same with the quadruple or larger line spacing. Converting to mobi and back to epub worked here as well.

I had been getting advice from the wonderful Kovid Goyal on this issue. Later on he posted advice to others to convert to mobi and back to epub at least 3 times to others.

I mass converted everything lrf, lit and they were all finally fine on the Kobo.

Having started ereading when most books were ugly, even if you paid for them or borrowed from the library and a popular embedded font for PD was a typewriter font I am pretty tolerant, but having an inch of empty screen between each line was way above my tolerance level.

Ideally for spacing, font, font sizes, indents, scene breaks, I want all of my books to be the same on all my readers. Library books I read as is or not read it, but anything I buy I want it consistent. And this worked for me.

Mass convert, a few hours, editing html one by one, Not in my lifetime.

Helen

[speakingtohe]

Originally Posted by theducks

What I do is simple/basic

Way more than simple/standard Paragraph indents
How about 3 men in a boat (found in the MR Library).

Charts, Hanging indents.

A lot can be worked around, but a simple conversion, no.

(I use AZW3 for my use, even then, my nice dropcaps on my PEz (MRSDK) come out with to much space below, lost the alignment.

OTOH embedded font do work

Ahh
I can live without hanging indents, and would, unfortunately, probably not notice they were gone. And drop caps are 1 per chapter? so if they work fine, but not a thing that causes me anguish.

I seem to recall that a few years ago I lost embedded fonts, but could be very wrong on that one. Maybe I had calibre set to remove them. I don't like embedded fonts and generally remove them even if they are pretty. Don't want floral, scribbled, antique, handwritten etc. Just me probably, but what are they thinking.

Ideally all of my ebooks will be formatted the same. And simple is better generally. Boring for some, more comfortable reading for me.

Helen

[speakingtohe]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Before you dump embedded fonts, you really need to stop and make sure the fonts are not needed. Like sometimes the fonts are embedded so the correct characters are displayed because the default font doesn't do it. Also, sometimes the embedded fonts are used to offset/highlight something and that you lose that if you remove them. There are more reasons for embedded fonts then just to display a certain font.

I am sure you are right. But I have been reading paper books for 60 years and almost all of them were pretty basic font wise.

I think using an embedded font to highlight something when it could just as easily been highlighted using bold, italics, indented paragraphs is unnecessary and perhaps a tad pretentious.

Correct characters? Again I am sure you are right, but hasn't actually happened to me and if it did I am pretty sure I could figure it out. And very bad planning to use characters that won't display correctly in the default font.

Generally I am of the KISS school these days. Even at a book a day I will never read 1/1000th of the books I want to. And some days I don't manage to finish a book. I only did the big convert because I actually wanted to use the Kobo HD when I bought it. But thanks for the advice. I appreciate it.

Helen

[elaidamramesh]

Good Day... hope this is not a silly question but I find that I am not able to send my converted AWZ3 files to Kindle through the mail. Is there something specific that needs to be done here. Also I am converting books from EPUB to AWZ3 using Calibre.

Originally Posted by speakingtohe

Correct characters? Again I am sure you are right, but hasn't actually happened to me and if it did I am pretty sure I could figure it out. And very bad planning to use characters that won't display correctly in the default font.

Helen

This may be less of an issue as Unicode has become the norm, but I can definitely conceive of situations where an author may have written a book largely in one font and then embedded one for occasional words, phrases or letters in a script not supported by the default font used. I'm currently reading a Hindi translation of The Jungle Book and some of its characters will only show in one or two of my devanagari fonts, not in all of them. Blank squares are annoying.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by elaidamramesh

Good Day... hope this is not a silly question but I find that I am not able to send my converted AWZ3 files to Kindle through the mail. Is there something specific that needs to be done here. Also I am converting books from EPUB to AWZ3 using Calibre.

As far as I recall, you need a simple mobi to email to your Kindle.

[AnemicOak]

Mobi or dual mobi (mobi/azw3 combo). You might be able to email just AZW3 like you can ePub (by changing the file extension to .png), but I haven't tried it, so not 100% sure.