I have a bunch of EPUB books that I have to convert to MOBI if I get a Kindle. I would like to know whether there will necessarily be any loss of detail (e.g. meta-data, layout info) during a conversion from EPUB to MOBI and vice versa, analogous to a conversion between MP3 and WMA? What happens when multiple conversions are applied consecutively, e.g. EPUB->MOBI->EPUB->MOBI->EPUB. How bad will the information loss get?
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Yes, it will be lossy. It's not possible to express the lossiness exactly, as it depends on the input source. EPUB allows use of any of XHTML1.1/CSS 2.1, whereas Mobipocket is essentially "HTML 3" as it existed many years ago, plus some proprietary tagging.
If the EPUB is primarily just text, the conversion will be acceptable. If it is highly designed, then it will likely still be readable, but look pretty terrible.
Liza Daly
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Kindlegen generates MOBI from EPUB. The basic metadata (title, author, toc etc) is kept intact. The text and images will get converted just fine. The CSS2 features such as floating elements will not be shown.
Not sure whether these are lost or not rendered. Generally EPUB retains everything that is zipped into it and a device choose to render whatever it understands. I guess MOBI too should work the same way.
Geordee Naliyath
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