: Re: Does a “one-fits-all” file format exist or should I offer multiple ebook formats? I want to publish my first e-book, but the multitude of available file formats (PDF, ePUB, MOBI, TXT, etc.)

@Ashley

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Most people here are focusing on the device side of the question, but there's another one that may be equally important: the economic side. This depends on what your goal with your book is—are you planning to sell it, or do you just want to distribute it so that lots of people can read it? If the latter, then yes, text files or PDF are reasonable options (though bear in mind that PDFs by and large are not reflowable, which means that they can be hard to read on devices with small screens, like cell phones).

If you're intending to sell your book, then you need to take into account the policies of the ebook marketplaces you're interested in selling through. The major market out there is, of course, Amazon, and they only sell MOBI/KF8 formats. Barnes & Noble, iBooks, Google Play, and Kobo all sell EPUB files, but even taken all together, Amazon is the larger market. The good news, though, is that in order to create a mobi file, you need a valid EPUB file and Kindle Previewer, so EPUB will pretty much get you a MOBI/KF8 file as well.

EPUB files are essentially just zipped up collections of HTML pages, so if you're looking for a single-source format, XHTML would be a great choice. Ensuring that it's the more-rigid XHTML will allow for greater transformability of your files, meaning that in the future it will be much easier to run your file through an automated tool that will convert it to whatever the Google Glass ebook format (or whatever) is.

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