The Nexus 7: Google ships a tablet

The Nexus 7: Google ships a tablet

PDF is a very bad format for e-books, it has the build-in requirement that you be viewing the page on a particular size screen (or you have to pan around the page, which is horrible in practice.

PDF does have its problems but if you want anything except the most basic formatting then EPUB (2.x) and especially the Kindle format won't do for you. On the Kindle 3, once you get to the point where you need a table that is not 100% trivial you're essentially up the creek without a paddle.

There is such a thing as »PDF reflow«, which the PRS-T1 does but the Kindle 3 doesn't. On the other hand, we have had reasonably good experience with generating PDF to fit reader-size screens, which is very nice on the PRS-T1 but sucks completely on the Kindle 3 because it won't let you use the links in the PDF to navigate, not even by scrolling around the page with the puny cursor keys. (The new touch-screen Kindle may or may not be better in that respect.)

Given that .mobi is a slight variation of .prc, are you sure that it can only be created with proprietary tools?

There is Calibre, but personally I wouldn't really be prepared to call that an authoring tool.