: Re: eBook format in nowadays: EPUB is de facto standard? It is a basic and old question... There was a "format war" for ebooks (a "Tower of eBabel" for users)... EPUB won? Wikipedia says that

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Amazon has over 2.8 million ebooks, including nearly all public domain books. See the left hand column, which provides an update to date count of ebooks available: www.amazon.com/s/ref=lp_154606011_ex_n_1?rh=n%3A133140011&bbn=133140011&ie=UTF8&qid=1410374478
This 2.8 million books makes things like Project Gutenberg statistically insignificant.

Your quote that "EPUB format is the most widely supported vendor-independent XML-based" is obviously designed to exclude MOBI/Kindle from the mix, because it's not vendor-independent. And sure, outside of Amazon, it is the dominant standard.

But more importantly, why do you want to know?

If the answer is because you want to know what format to publish a book in, versus you want to build an eReader app, versus you're writing a research paper, there are very different implications.

If you're an author publishing commercial fiction, since Amazon has about 65% of the ebook market, you must publish in MOBI to be successful. If you are an indie author, Amazon has an even bigger percentage of the market for indie authors (anecdotally 80+%), and so it becomes even more crucial.

If you are providing an ebook where access is crucial, e.g. a school text book that must be available to all students, then you must publish in both EPUB and MOBI.

Since EPUB and MOBI can be easily converted back and forth, one might argue that the question is irrelevant. Simply provide books in both formats.

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