An issue that often arises during conversion is missing or incomplete formatting. Not all e-book formats support the same formatting, so layout details may be lost when converting from one format to another. Formatting attributes, like bold and italics, will be preserved in most cases but complex page layout may not be. AZW3 and EPUB both support complex formatting, so you won’t have to worry about this as much when converting between these formats.

Conversion will only shift what the input provides into another format. It will not add anything that was not already in the input to the output. If the input is poorly formatted, the output will be too.

There are some conversion options, Search & Replace and Heuristic Processing, that allow for some modification of the e-book’s content. These options should be used with care. Since they modify the e-book’s content there is the possibility of losing something by accident. It’s best to avoid these options unless you know what you’re doing.

2.7: DRM: the bane of conversion

DRM is an acronym for Digital Rights Management.

Let’s think about physical books for a moment. With a physical book, you can lend or resell your book. But when you do either, you are without the book. With e-books, that is not necessarily the case. E-books are just files on your computer and they can be copied any number of times and given away any number of times. DRM was designed to prevent unlimited copying of an electronic file. Some e-book reader users would say that it is a handy way for companies to try to lock users into a specific brand.

DRM “enables” (really it disables) various end-user rights as determined by the publisher and seller. Some DRM’d e-books cannot be read on more than one device. Some will allow for only partial copying and printing. Some may even allow for lending, a feature shared with physical books. Simply put, DRM restricts what you can do with your e-book. I believe that Digital Restrictions Management is a more sutitable name.

An e-book with DRM cannot be converted to a different format. This is because conversion itself would require the removal of the DRM. Not all e-book formats support DRM and different e-book formats support different DRM restrictions. There is no way to move the DRM with the content when converting; thus DRM prevents conversion.