February 2011 - gutvol-d - lists.pglaf.org

Buy twice -- read everywhere
by Marcello Perathoner 05 Feb '11

05 Feb '11

"[Apple] has told some applications developers, including Sony, that they can no longer sell content, like e-books, within their apps, or let customers have access to purchases they have made outside the App Store." -- http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/01/technology/01apple.html Now, if you want to read a book on your Kindle at home, and on your iPhone on the road, you'll have to buy it twice. In related news, Android is now selling twice as fast as iOS: http://www.canalys.com/pr/2011/r2011013.html I guess some companies just deserve to lose. They lost against M$ when they had a superior product. How big are they going to lose now, that they have an inferior product and still refuse to play? -- Marcello Perathoner webmaster(a)gutenberg.org

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!@!!@!!@! Major Crash
by Michael S. Hart 04 Feb '11

04 Feb '11

For those of you writing the movie of my life this is more "normal" than you might think, I should have known something was UP when the computer started at first try when I got back home two weeks ago. Once again it has announced it has died the final death, and now it wouldn't go no matter all my shaking, tapping, pounding, etc. Luckily, I had just made backups of all important files!!! So, when I finally gave up all my usual cinematic efforts, I undid the hard drive and blew out all the connections, and tried again. Lo and behold. . .VISTA!!! This was one of the only machines around that ever did XP AND VISTA but the Vista part died long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away... Until now. . .I'M BAAAACK!!! Hee hee! So, while not everyting seems to be working, it does appear I quite literally have once again escated the jaws of virtual death for the immediate future. . .as usual I am NOT rebooting until I have to so let's see how much work I can do meantime!!! For those who were helping me pick out my next computer, keep at it even harder. . .I may spend real money on a USB 3.0 machine or will just get whatever is the best deal around. I usually get HP but... More, I hope, later. . . . Michael

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RAIDS and other backups
by Michael S. Hart 04 Feb '11

04 Feb '11

BTW, I agree with Al even more than I mentioned before. xcopy and the win drag and drop do much better with big file and massive copies than most backup programs which I avoid like the plague. No kidding. I have known way too many six figure professionals whom I have seen religiously backup every Friday this time-- and then, when they needed something: NADA ZIP ZILCH and they tied last week's and the one before and before, and found that not one of them damn things ever worked! Me? My solution was to restore from the backup right away? Huh? Yep, basically the same idea Al was talking about. Let's set the Wayback Machine for 1983. . . . I built my first IBM machine, all genuine parts except the genuin Seagate ST-506 drive and Zobex controller. The owner of Zobex talked me through the mods to setup for THREE hard drives, so I could BACKUP C: to D: then RESTORE D: to E:, then I could delete the file on D: This way I got my "file by file" backup!!! This seemed so cute to others that I was eventually in PCWEEK on Mother's Day 1986 with my first national hit publication. . .go figure. . .they never mentioned the whole eBook thing. . . . Anyway. . .that was my first little claim to fame when I was still working on Shakespeare and The Bible, then got the idea for Alice In Wonderland that set the snow in motion to eventually create the eBook avalanche. Hee hee! mh

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Re: Kindle Previewer and EPUB to MOBI Converter
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 04 Feb '11

04 Feb '11

once again, jim demonstrates for us that he _will_ make a point, if he thinks he has one. but it usually ends up that he really didn't... jim said: > compare his ZML generated outputs > at his site z-m-l.com to the > HTML, EPUB, and/or MOBI files > for the same source documents > at the site gutenberg.org first, jim forgot to give the exact u.r.l.: > http://www.z-m-l.com/go/vl3.pl i'm quite confident i can make my output conform to the files found at p.g. today, if jim says that's how he wants 'em to look. the trouble is, jim won't take a firm stand... it's a lot easier for him to make vague claims, call things "ugly", and hope you won't look... besides, i thought he was always complaining about the .epub and .mobi files created by p.g.? now he's holding them up as some standard, against which mine should be compared? ok. at any rate, if anyone _does_ care to look at those .html files i generated at that website, and has feedback for me, i'd love to hear it... i did that converter years ago -- in perl!, and we all know i'm in perl elementary school -- so it might be much different today, but i'd be surprised if the converter failed to work in a way, even today, that gave bad output... ok, i looked, and i put that up february, 2007. the converter i'm using _today_ is, in fact, very much different from the one up on my website, as the current one is programmed in realbasic, which is my primary programming environment. (my "real" converter has always been in realbasic; i just did the perl to put something on the net.) but jim doesn't want you to look at the work that i'm producing today. instead, he wants you to look at the work i was making 4 years back... or, even better, to look at apple and best buy and... *** anyway, jim, put yourself to some good use, ok? tell the people here just exactly what they need to create, in the way of additional files, if they want to turn an .html file into .mobi and .epub. ok, i'll tell them: an .opf file and an .ncx file... but jim, _you_ can give us some _examples_ of those two files, which can serve as _templates_. you can use the .html we created for "the jungle"; it's pretty simple, a dedication and 31 chapters... if you don't want to create the files yourself, you can point us to good examples on the net. i will confirm if your examples are good ones... (because i finally puzzled it out, after having failed to find complete examples on the web... so if you were expecting that you could do that, because i just told you that i would settle for it, you might want to think again. or perhaps you are just better at finding such stuff on the web.) *** part of the reason for this exercise, so you know, is that when you use the .epub to .mobi converter which is referenced in the subject of this thread, you probably _won't_ get a perfect .mobi out of it, because kindle expects particular stuff in a .mobi, and many .epubs just don't have that stuff in them. for instance, .epubs from feedbooks.com do not... you don't get a table of contents in the conversion. .epubs from p.g. are not consistent in this regard. (except that none of 'em give .mobi a cover-page.) for instance, from "wings of a dove", which jim did, you get no table of contents, and a messed-up .ncx, as jim did "tag abuse" of headers on the title-page: > http://z-m-l.com/go/jjngl/doves-mobi-ncx.png but the .epub for "the jungle" converts to a .mobi which has a table of contents _and_ the .ncx too... the only problem is that the formatting is a bit off, once again due to some tag abuse on front-matter: > http://z-m-l.com/go/jjngl/thejungle-mobi-01.png > http://z-m-l.com/go/jjngl/thejungle-mobi-02.png > http://z-m-l.com/go/jjngl/thejungle-mobi-03.png another .epub that i converted over to .mobi was the one generated by the .tei done by jon noring, a few years back, for the book "my antonia", which had a fairly good table of contents and an .ncx too, an .ncx which is quite excellent, in that it contains nested elements (chapters within "books"), which is a new development for .ncx, which used to be "flat". there was a problem, though, in that page-numbers were inserted into the text, in an obtrusive manner: > http://z-m-l.com/go/jjngl/antonia-page7.png most of these things _do_ work in the "native" .mobi being generated by p.g. (and probably feedbooks too), so i'd say you're better off using that than trying to "leverage" the .epub file by creating .mobi out of it. and yes, if you're like most of us normal human beings, all of this nonsense about "this works here, under such circumstances, but not there, under those conditions" is tremendously confusing. baffling, and unnecessary. heck, it's enough to make you throw up your hands and give up on electronic-books altogether, which is precisely what the corporate publishing industry wants you to do, which is why they have issued all this unclarity upon us... so the real question is whether you are _wise_enough_ to throw it all off and adopt something much smarter... in the meantime, jim, if you could report back to me with those template files _sooner_ rather than _later_, that'd be great. thanks a bunch. have a nice weekend. -bowerbird

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Re: Kindle Previewer and EPUB to MOBI Converter
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 04 Feb '11

04 Feb '11

jim said: > personal attacks it's clear to everyone that i am "attacking" your ideas, and it has absolutely nothing to do with you as a person, jim. everyone. including you. you're just doing a dodge, as you have no answers to my questions... if you did, as you have just shown, you would be jumping in with both feet, as soon as you could. but your position is now in complete shambles, jim, so don't fret. this won't last much longer... everyone with a brain who is paying attention now knows exactly why .html will not work as a "master-format" for project gutenberg, and the people without brains who are not paying any attention don't need to be of any concern. *** jim said: > Can someone please add the download counts > for PDF format files to this location, so that BB can > see how compelling the actual PG customer base > finds his rhetoric? > ... > If you want to put PDF up on PG BB, > who is stopping you? Certainly not me. did you notice how fast jim responds when he thinks he _has_ a response? so his non-answers on the hard questions become ever-more-telling by the minute... and of course, even those times where jim _thinks_ he has an answer are misleading, due to his poor reading comprehension... i'm sure none of you were confused, so please pardon me while i 'splain things to jim, so he knows he can't play this little trick on us where he pretends that he doesn't understand, _or_ so he will know exactly what i did and did not say in case he _really_ didn't understand... i did _not_ say p.g. should create .pdfs. as i have repeated endlessly, i do not give a smelly rat's ass what p.g. does... i _am_ talking about people using my tool to create .pdfs for their own personal use, customized to their specific preferences... most specifically tomorrow's self-publishers and their fans with a wide mix of hardware... read those last two paragraphs again, jim. and then again, and then again and again, until they sink in, and you understand 'em. so i don't have to repeat them again later... as for download numbers, they are funny... yes, the download totals for .pdf at p.g. will be anemic. because p.g. rarely offers a .pdf version, as we are all quite aware... (the fact that jim evidently considers this to be meaningful information is a great indication how sound his judgment is.) but there are other places we can look at... take feedbooks.com, for instance. for a time, a very, very, very long time, .pdf downloads dominated the total. it became embarrassing for hadrien, who runs the site, because he is a staunch advocate of the .epub file-format... so what did he do? he made it so the default download format is .epub. he assumed, and rightly so, that downloaders probably had _some_ app that would display an .epub file, so if they downloaded an .epub, it would be opened by that app, and voila, there it was... now, to get a .pdf, or any other file-format, you have to forego the "download" button, which is the obvious choice, doncha think?, and click on the book's title to be taken to a list of possible formats you can download. (and there's _nothing_ to indicate that's so, so i bet many of his users don't know that.) so, guess what happened? go ahead, guess! that's right! his .epub downloads soared, and the .pdf ones went down, so that _now_ .epub downloads outnumber the .pdf ones. now hadrien regularly touts his .epub totals. haha. nice trick, hadrien. so download numbers don't mean much to me. but there's another wrinkle here as well... i had to actually go and visit the nook website and the kobo website to see if those machines would read .pdf. i honestly did not remember. heck, i'm not sure if i ever knew it to begin with. and i'm someone who actively follows this stuff! so, if i were a newbie buying a kobo or a nook, i might well be perfectly flummoxed about what kind of files it could read. and since all of the e-bookstores are selling .epub files -- because that's "the e-book open standard" -- i would soon come to look for that file-format myself, without even realizing that my machine could display a .pdf file just fine. and even if i _did_ remember, and tried to load a .pdf, odds are that it would've been created by some _idiot_ who used the "standard" 8.5*11 pagesize and thus made the .pdf unreadable on an e-reader. so i would "conclude" that ".pdf doesn't work", and i would go back to using the .epub format. and i might never even come to know the fact that i could prepare my own .pdf, to my custom preferences, to a pagesize based on my machine, that could well work _far_better_ than the vast majority of .epubs being produced at this time. but once they get my one-click conversion tool, these newbies might get a lot smarter, very fast... -bowerbird

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Re: in other news
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 04 Feb '11

04 Feb '11

jim said: > ...but one can walk into the front door of Best Buy > and actually try out (or buy) from a half dozen or more > different eBook Readers from the major vendors > (Apple excepted). i woulda swore that i've played with an ipad in best buy... but who cares? so what? if you don't like apple's policy, then don't buy from apple. it's really that simple. really. and if you think apple's policy will sink it in the marketplace, you don't need to say anything at all, not one thing, do you? just say "i predict it will sink apple in the marketplace" and come back later, if it actually happens, and say "told you so". all the handwringing just marks you as drama-queens... -bowerbird p.s. but we all know that what you're _really_ afraid of is that you're dead-wrong, and apple will be able to get away with it. go ahead, just like tim o'reilly, and make a "bold prediction"... so if you end up wrong, you'll have some egg on your face too.

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Re: 14.8 million ipads sold (in 9 months) during 2010
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 03 Feb '11

03 Feb '11

gee, it's already past 1pm, pacific, and no sight of jim. anyway... here's another question for him, when he does show up. if p.g. were to adopt .html as "a master format", then _which_ version of .html would it be? the lower-bound on accepted .html files these days is 4.01-transitional... but i think a variety of other .html and .xhtml versions are accepted. and meanwhile, html5 is looming large... indeed, you might have heard that one of the two big organizations that "controls" .html has even decided to _drop_versioning_, and renamed html5 as "html"... from now on, it will be "a living standard", dictated solely by whatever definition exists on its website... meanwhile, the other organization is _stressing_ the "5" in .html5 (instead of dropping it), and came out with a _logo_ that looks like a superman badge, but with a "5" instead of the "s". and then there are all the wars over the video codec used in html5. it seems there's no "standard" there. indeed, there are even discussions about what should be included in the html5 name. should css3 be in it? how about geolocation? offline storage? webworkers? all by itself, it seems, html5 makes good on the rub: > "the reason standards are so nice is that > there are so many to choose from." yet _somehow,_ jim, our hero, is gonna come up with a version of .html for p.g. to use as its master-format. so please, jim, reveal this "great compromise". the world is waiting... -bowerbird

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how to make an .epub file easily
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 03 Feb '11

03 Feb '11

by the way, if _you_ are struggling with .epub creation, backchannel me, and i'll tell you how to make it easier. i'm not just gonna blurt it out on this listserve, because .epub is a crap format that should die fast and painfully. but _you_ shouldn't have to suffer any pain just because some o.c.d. technocrats forced their crap format on you. -bowerbird

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Re: 14.8 million ipads sold (in 9 months) during 2010
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 02 Feb '11

02 Feb '11

i said: > ok, i sure hope jim swings by today... oh look, jim _did_ swing by today... and failed to answer any of my questions... jim, your silence is starting to speak volumes. you don't _have_ any answers for me, do you? you're even afraid to give an ok to any of the samples i have showed you, because you have figured out how this story ends for you, right? no more easy dismissal of other people's work as "ugly", and -- even worse -- no more ability for you to throw around your half-baked ideas. anyway, i'm glad you're having fun playing with kindle's .epub converter, even if you _did_ say end-users don't like to have to use converters. so tell me, does that converter allow the person to specify their preferences on the converted file? you know, for justified versus ragged-right, or for block-paragraphs versus indented, or for curly-quotes versus straight, or for em-dashes versus double-dashes, or margins, or fonts, or leading, or any or the other things we mention? or do you just have to settle for whatever you get? yeah, that's what i thought... -bowerbird

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in other news
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 02 Feb '11

02 Feb '11

in other news, target announced it would not allow walmart to set up walmart kiosks in target stores... -bowerbird

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