- gutvol-d - lists.pglaf.org

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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Re: Kindle Previewer and EPUB to MOBI Converter
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 02 Feb '11

02 Feb '11

jim said: > Just playing around with Amazon's Kindle Previewer > ... > and I notice that you can ask it to display an EPUB file, > in which case it compiles that file into MOBI format ok, that's nice. we already had kindlegen to create .mobi from .html, but the hassle of backconverting an .epub into something you could feed .mobi was often an ugly chore... so it's nice of amazon to release this converter into the wild. (they've had it for their own use for some time now, which is why they were willing to accept .epub as input for their d.t.p.) > Now if we book developers only had a reliable way > to compile HTML to EPUB -- so that we can preview > what our HTML will look like on EPUB and MOBI devices. gee, jim, i know how you're _trying_ to change the subject, and all. but you have walked right into the quicksand here. because my tool lets "book developers" create an .epub... by simply clicking a button. along with .html and .mobi... with all of those output formats being converted from the .zml master-format which is very simple to create and edit. in other words, i give people what you are asking for. and i require far less of them than you would require. (you'd require them to do .html, while i do it for them.) so yes, indeed, i expect "book developers" will use my tool to generate a "canonical" version of their .html, .mobi, and .epub files, which nondiscriminating users "just download". but i also expect that they will make the master-format .zml file available to their end-users, so that those end-users can use my tool to make e-books customized to their preferences. you might think you can force your files on people. i think that if i give them the power to customize, they won't settle for the files you forced on them. -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

ok, i sure hope jim swings by today... jim, i was just checking, and you know what? nook can read .pdfs just fine... so can kobo... and so too with a number of other e-readers. (but long run, those others are likely goners.) so if the people who own these machines can quickly and easily create .pdfs _customized_ to the exact specifications of their preferences -- as they can, with the tool i've developed -- .pdf ends up as a very useful format for them... maybe someday your kindle can do that too... on the whole, though, one has to be impressed with the universality amazon has attained with its .mobi format. it created viewer-programs for all of the major platforms, and they all sync well, so even though amazon chose _not_ to adopt the "e-book standard file-format", it sure hasn't hurt their uptake. nobody comes close to their share. i've been waiting for literally 2 years to post this. since 2 years ago, tim o'reilly (yes, that one), said: > I have a bold prediction: Unless Amazon > embraces open e-book standards like epub, > which allow readers to read books > on a variety of devices, the Kindle > will be gone within two or three years. > http://www.forbes.com/2009/02/22/kindle-oreilly-ebooks-technology-breakthro… see the glaring mistake he made? that the only way readers could "read books on a variety of devices" is if amazon "embraced an open e-book standard". oops... a lot of people think tim o'reilly is a very smart guy, and i'm not about to argue with them, but we need to acknowledge that he made a very stupid mistake with this "bold prediction" of his, and it is the same very stupid mistake that _lots_ of people have made -- including one guy who used to post here a lot -- which is that if you have "an open e-book standard", all sorts of magical things will happen automatically. well, guess what, they don't. and furthermore, a good number of those "magical" things can happen even if you _don't_ choose to use a file-format that's "open" or "standard" or even both. in such a case, you need to apply the elbow grease, which is exactly what amazon did, and it _worked_... it worked _big_time_... self-published authors are now making some extremely big money on amazon. a 27-year old kid (i'm old enough to call a 27-year old woman a kid, yes, i am) has sold _half-a-million_ e-books through the various e-bookstores out there, the big bulk of 'em through the amazon kindle-store. she only made $.35 each on some of those sales, but she made $2 a piece on the others, so she's closing in on her first million dollars as a self-published author. and she had never sold a book before april 15, 2010. and many others have reached other levels of success. konrath, one leader, made $64,000 the last 2 months, and looks to make up to a million bucks in this _year_. so it's clear to everyone that the kindle is not "gone"... not by a longshot... it's here, big, and in your _face_... so now tim o'reilly has egg on his face. -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

in case any of you were wondering why sony decided to stir up a little anti-apple spin soup on february 1st about apple's in-app purchasing, it's because apple has had a press-conference announced for some time for february 2nd about ...in-app purchasing. i'm not sure why all of the observers who were commenting on the issue all over cyberspace didn't acknowledge that, but hey, you know, when the elephants fight, the little animals just run and hide. anyway, let's see what apple says on groundhog day, ok? oh, by the way, the press conference is being jointly held with rupert murdoch, which is a big blatant warning you better plug your nose, since this crap is gonna smell really, really bad. -bowerbird

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Re: 14.8 million ipads sold (in 9 months) during 2010
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 01 Feb '11

01 Feb '11

oh crap... anyway... that's what i get for e-mailing stuff between my account and my girlfriend's account... -bowerbird

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Re: 14.8 million ipads sold (in 9 months) during 2010
by Morasch＠aol.com 01 Feb '11

01 Feb '11

by the way, when i opened that e-mail in my iphone, and clicked on the link to the .pdf there in my iphone, it opened up the .pdf in safari just nice and slick like... the native .pdf reader isn't all too accommodating in its capabilities, but the readability of the page was good... i did a screenshot and uploaded it to my site: > http://z-m-l.com/go/jjngl/jjngle-iphone-image.jpg never been much of a fan of .pdf, but it's impossible to deny that it's ubiquitous... -bowerbird

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Re: 14.8 million ipads sold (in 9 months) during 2010
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 01 Feb '11

01 Feb '11

ho hum, and yet another day goes by where jim fails to answer any of the hard questions, or provide any material for our competition... oh well, maybe we'll have better luck tomorrow. at any rate, here's my .pdf for our exercise: > http://z-m-l.com/go/jjngl/jjngl.pdf this is the "quick-and-dirty" version, which authors will use on an every-day basis to put out a clean copy of their current work... it's still pretty complete, with user-specified font, fontsize, margins, colors, run-heads, footers, metadata, linked table-of-contents, all of the usual rot that i usually mention... but a few of the spacing issues are wonky... plus it's lacking some of the polish niceties, such as widow/orphan control. (and crikey, hadn't even brought that up till now, had i?) another thing that i hadn't mentioned before is the ability to control chapter-end orphans. those are the worst kind, to have one or two or three lines sitting _all_alone_ on a page at the end of a chapter. don't wanna have that! there were 3 such cases, fixed, in this version. if anyone has any feedback, i'd love to hear it. anyway, jim, hope to hear from you tomorrow. i'd like to get your ok on the current .html file, so i can regenerate the .mobi and .epub files... don't keep me waiting, or i'll track you down... -bowerbird

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Re: 14.8 million ipads sold (in 9 months) during 2010
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 31 Jan '11

31 Jan '11

jim said: > yet-another round of an escalating war of > fiddling, unfiddling, and re-fiddling. no, jim, you're not going to evade the issue with doubletalk. and, just so it's clear, when you discuss the problems with using .html, you are only _weakening_ your base position... just in case you didn't notice that particular little reversal... *** jim said: > If I remember BB, you were trying > to convince people why they should i'm not surprised you can't remember what's happening, because you confused yourself with your reversals and evasions and doubletalk and side-road explorations... so i will remind you. first of all, let's dispense with the notion that i am "trying" to "convince" anyone of anything. this is a very common misconception that i have cleared up time and time again, but nonetheless people keep regenerating it spontaneously. i'm not trying to "convince" anybody of anything. i don't give a rat's ass what anybody does, including p.g. yes, i do say that "p.g. should do such-and-such", but that's just another way of saying "the best practice to do so-and-so is to do such-and-such". what p.g. _actually_ does is up to p.g. so it's exactly like when i say "the u.s. should get out of iraq". i'm not running for president in order to implement that, and i'm under no illusions that i can influence u.s. foreign policy, and in the end it makes no difference to me what happens, i'm just airing my voice to tell the world what i see as truth... the same thing here. just airing my voice to speak my truth. it's all just intellectual dialog. make of it what you will. dig? *** now, let's get back to jim, because this is all about you, jim... so let's remind people what you said, jim... jim said that p.g. should make .html its master-format. that's a ridiculous position, with which i take serious issue. jim said this is because people want to download e-books and just have them work the way they want, and not have to "fiddle" with them. this position, on the other hand, is one that i actually agree with... until, that is, jim appends that .html is the format that will best serve this purpose, which again transports his position into the land of the ridiculous. so that's what we're talking about here, jim. i'm showing the world that your position, on making .html the master-format for p.g., is ridiculous. it is unworkable. i'm also showing that .html will _not_ create a world where p.g. end-users can simply "download an e-book that works the way that they want it to", for a wide variety of reasons... those are the things we're talking about jim. and i'm gonna keep talking about them until everyone here on this listserve recognizes that you have no clue about what you're talking about. in the past, i've let you slip away without being pinned down, but then you just pop up months later with the same tripe, so this time, we're gonna end your nonsense once and for all. > Do I like HTML? No, not particularly. Then why use it? > Because a large number of PG "authors" CAN write in it, > using any of a very large variety of tools, and > have the results more-or-less readable > on a very large variety of machines yeah, you're not gonna slip out of the pin by watering down your arguments, either, because then you only have a watered-down position... yes, it's true that a large number of p.g. digitizers _can_ create .html, and that they use a large variety of tools... that's part of the problem... indeed, that is probably the _biggest_ part of the problem. because there are so many different ways to do something in .html, especially if we consider all the different "versions" of .html, some of which are the xhtml variants, and which are inconsistent with the other ways of doing .html, there will be _inconsistencies_ among the various practitioners. it's those inconsistencies which make it impossible to do anything useful with the files. all your attempts to "solve" this problem just introduce more problems into the mix, and you cannot solve those _either_... i can only imagine that you don't know this already because you've never really tried to do anything useful with the files. the other thing is that you've watered down your position where now the e-books are just "more or less readable", instead of the big brave talk where the files would work "the way the end-user wants". the truth of the matter is, you ignore any end-users who don't fit in your pattern... if they don't want .mobi or .epub, or your "master" .html, you simply ignore them, as if they didn't matter one bit... further, if they have any specific preferences, tough luck. if the book comes as justified, but they want ragged-right, and the e-book viewer-program won't let 'em change that, tough luck. if the quotes are curly but they like 'em straight, and the e-book viewer-program won't let 'em change that, tough luck. if they want block-paragraphs versus indented, and the e-book viewer-program won't let 'em change that, tough luck. in other words, if "the way you want the files" happens to match the way jim likes his files, then it's fine. otherwise, it's tough luck. that's no way to treat the users. and let's be frank. a lot of these .epub viewer-programs _will_not_ let you change these important variables, _or_ any number of _other_ important preference variables... and it's even worse than that, because a lot of these .epub viewer-programs have bugs inconsistent with each other. so we're reliving the nightmare of "browser inconsistencies" that has plagued us for the last decade (and still does today, if we consider things like the battles over the video codec)... so even if you put out a consistent .epub -- and remember, you won't, because your base .html files are inconsistent -- but even if you _did_ put out a consistent .epub, it wouldn't get rendered consistently across your end-user population. these are some of the problems, jim. and this is why your position is ludicrous. and we're going to drill that home... -bowerbird

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