Comments on: Mobipocket now handles ePub automatically, and ePub creation tools MAY be on the way (we’re checking)

By: Tony

Tony — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 00:44:18 +0000

any body heard any more news on this

By: David Rothman

David Rothman — Tue, 20 May 2008 17:00:31 +0000

Heck, Aaron, it’s one step closer to ePub as a consumer format. The book biz simply needs to remember, it’s in the biz of selling books, not promoting proprietary formats. E-books need to be as simple to buy and own as audio CDs, and sooner or later the industry will understand. Meanwhile we need to some U.K. publishers will offer ePub as a consumer format. Thanks. David

By: Aaron S. Miller, CTO of BookGlutton, a Web-based community of readers

Aaron S. Miller, CTO of BookGlutton, a Web-based community of readers — Tue, 20 May 2008 16:42:50 +0000

There’s a lot of talk lately about converting from EPUB into other formats. This doesn’t bode well for its chances as an end format, does it?

By: Todd Jonz

Todd Jonz — Mon, 19 May 2008 17:27:43 +0000

Right on, Al. As long as the .mobi publishing tools only run on Windows, you’re just pushing the e-Babel a little bit further down the stack.

By: Al

Al — Mon, 19 May 2008 16:58:03 +0000

Did I not also see “support for other platforms” somewhere? As a Mac user, I am ignoring all these comments until I can run the mobi programs natively on my Mac. Yes, I know I can switch to emulation, but I choose not to.

By: Rob Preece

Rob Preece — Sat, 17 May 2008 22:07:43 +0000

This is excellent news and part of Mobipocket’s attempt to overcome the tower of eBabel through a combination of making Mobi available everywhere as a format, and allowing the MobiReader to read “foreign” formats as necessary.

From a publisher standpoint, being able to use the easy-to-read Mobipocket Creator tool to generate both Mobipocket and ePub documents is a step in the right direction. Of course, we’ll still have to generate multiple formats, manage changes across them, etc. Still, it’s better than a different tool (using different source formats) for each end format, which is today’s world.

Rob Preece
Publisher, http://www.BooksForABuck.com

By: Keith Fahlgren

Keith Fahlgren — Sat, 17 May 2008 20:00:12 +0000

The latest build of mobigen, the .epub to .mobi converter tool released by Mobipocket, is a much more reliable tool. We were seeing very high failure rates (mobigen crashes) on earlier builds with “valid” (via epubcheck) .epub documents, but the new version seems to have been enhanced with a focus on robustness. My complaint at this point is the Windows-only support, which preempts us from trying to do .epub to .mobi in a batch process. All that said, perhaps with the new version of the reader software we’ll stop bothering to consider creating .mobi at all… (with luck).