David> What has this to do with master formats? Commercial publishers don't
publish their master files, you can at most see their distribution files. Mostly, DRM-ed.
If your master format *is* your distribution format then at least two good things happen: 1) What people see on their computer the moment before they submit it to PG is the same identical thing they or their friends see when they download it from PG. There is no tool-chain sausagemaker to screw things up. 2) If the distribution format is identical to the master format then each distribution into the world is another copy of the master format that is being preserved for posterity, and which immediately becomes useful for any derivative efforts. In comparison if PG picks an obscure format then the "master file" only lives as long as Amazon has a group of volunteers who are willing to keep the tool chain alive for all eternity. And are willing to volunteer to write to that format. As soon as they get sick of it then the master format becomes dead. Amazon has a huge business publishing things submitted in EPUB format, which is the source format, but which they then *sometimes not always* distribute in their own DRM wrapper -- the choice of DRM or no DRM is up to the author. B&N and Apple also do these things, and the other smaller distributors. Agreed once something is DRM'ed it no longer matters what is used to be -- because now it is 100% vendor specific. Amazon is now releasing KF8 file format which much more closely follows EPUB standards, presumably because the major publishing houses want to distribute to Amazon in EPUB format. Granted, not everyone writes directly in EPUB. Some who are paper-oriented author first in Dreamweaver, which in turn has a less-than-perfect EPUB output option, which authors typically clean up in Sigil, before publishing, or redistributing, in EPUB format. Some even author in Word Docs. So, EPUB can be, and is being used as, a primary, secondary, and tertiary format. The format is about "as simple as you can get" while still containing the things you really need to be "a book." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPUB