Then again, this hasn’t really prevented the widespread adoption/distribution of mobipocket files.

Because OEBPS is based on open standards, many other people will be creating conversion tools. The building blocks have already been around for some time, on many platforms and in many programming languages. Unlike proprietary formats, there’s no extensive sleuthing or building from scratch to have a basic conversion tool. The real challenge comes in creating .epubs that work across systems. Systems need to be fairly fault-tolerant of the standard, especially this early in the game, or people will give up on it pretty quickly. Fortunately the standard is fairly thorough about how to provide fallback mechanisms and handle unknown or unsupported types of content.

The best thing is that it seems to take as its basic assumption that Web technologies are perfectly suited for the evolution of books. And in line with this assumption, I think, is the notion that the Web Browser represents the ideal platform and environment for books (other than paper, which is just, really undeniably great).

PS For those who signed up and may be wondering about our launch date, all I can say is “soon” . . . sorry about the delays, but they are typical. Over the next week or two, we’ll begin rolling people into our Private Beta, and from there . . . “very soon”!

This is correct. In fact you can have a jointly compatible oeb 1.2 and .epub publication. See:

http://www.idpf.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=57

—–

My understanding is that epub is backwards compatible with the OEB 1.2 standard. This means that your LIT ebooks should be easily convertable (after using ConvertLit). I would think that HTML should be easy as well. I never have found a way to take an IMP file (even without DRM) and extract anything usable from it.

For PRC, I assume you mean Mobipocket? Or maybe not, since a PRC could be one of several different formats. There are some programs to extract the text, HTML and images from a non-DRM Mobipocket file. For one with DRM, see the recent discussion on MobleRead (not easy for the average user).

As for PDF, that always has been a lost cause (IMHO) and will continue to be one. Even the high dollar programs don’t do a very good job of converting a PDF to anything else (I have tried most of them). PDF is made for a strictly formatted page image and trying to do anything else with it is almost impossible, unless you have an extremely simple PDF and/or spend huge amounts of time manually cleaning up the converted output. Even Abobe’s own solution of “tagging” a PDF to make it reflowable is half-a**ed at best.

Although there are some instructions on the net about manually creating an epub book, I am waiting for someone to release an easy to use tool for us mere mortals (not just the high dollar tools for the publishers).

I’m sure the publishers would rather that we all just gave them more money to buy all of our ebooks over again (and again), if and when they decide to standardize on a common format.

I totally sympathize with owners of existing books in proprietary formats, especially those infested by DRM. This is exactly what we need a standard format to prevent such problems from arising in the future. If big publishers insist on DRM, then it needs to be interoperable to avoid the creation of Tower of eBabel II. My own strong preference would be no DRM or, as a compromise, social DRM. But the DRM issue differs from the format issue.

Meanwhile I hope you’ll support the creation of an .epub logo for nonDRMed books. A future logo could include both DRMed and nonDRMED books.

Thanks,
David

Note that this is native epub support, not the trick I reported earlier of renaming the epub to “.oebzip” to get FBReader to open it.

What happens to the mishmash of variously formatted ebooks that many of us have collected? Will we be able to easily convert various formats like .lit, .rtf, .htm, .prc, .imp and others into .epub?

I assume the answer will be no for anything that is burdened with drm. I also assume that strictly formated stuff like .pdf will not be easily converted. But I sure would like to be able to at least convert all my non-DRM non-PDF ebooks into a single standard format.

Meanwhile, as for Amazon/Mobipocket, one of the more important of the implementers, Nick has pointed to a Mobi forum that contains following from a Mobipocket employee:

Our software does not handle all IDPF 2.0 features yet.

As soon as we start implementing its native support , I will contact you from here in order to let you participate to the beta versions if any.

Thanks for your feedback.

Kind regards,

Aurélien

The bad news is that true .epub support still isn’t available in Mobipocket Desktop—far from it. The good news is use of the phrase “native support.” Does this mean that in the future, Mobi will simply render .epub without any translation available? Like the forum poster who asked a follow-up question, I’d love to know Mobipocket’s schedule for implementation in its various flavors of e-reader software. Ditto if Mobi is actually planning to use the .epub format on its retail site. The ETA?

Not just consumers but also publishers should lean on Amazon to use .epub on the Mobi and Amazon sites to reduce the e-book industry’s eBabel hassles for consumers. While the Mobipocket-oriented Kindle will generate revenue for Amazon, e-book sales will create more. Go where the cash is! Standards are inevitable, and Amazon should think long term if it wants a sustainable business.

David