On 18 May 2005, at 7:58, rvijay07 wrote:
Branko Collin collin at xs4all.nl wrote:
I think annecdotal evidence is no evidence at all. It is useless to discuss the growing or lessening popularity of ebooks in general based on a few of Vijay's personal observations.
Those personal observations can be fun to talk about in their own right, but they are not evidence of a trend.
Very true of the above and agreed. I have also read about postts on web-sites in regards to people preferring real books and to stay away from ebooks as they are not good for eyes. So as a NEWBIE, I just wanted to know more in this regard from those with more experience.
I read a story once about a Distributed Proofreaders volunteer who got into a conversation on a plane with the lady sitting next to him. It turned out that the stack of papers on her lap was actually a book she had printed out from Project Gutenberg. IIRC, it was a book that she had looked for for a long time, but could not find, until it turned up at PG. It is success stories like these that motivate me to be a volunteer. The failure stories,... well, they are sad and certainly should be taken as a lesson of how we can improve things. But in the end, we provide a service for people who appreciate our product, not for those who don't. Also, keep in mind that what PG produces is the raw material. We produce very basic ebooks that everybody has access to. Third parties can then take (most of) these raw materials and add value to them in some way. We are constantly working to make the life of these third parties easier. For instance, we are working on a format for meta-data, so that (in theory at least) it would be easier to produce richer versions of our etexts. Also, we produce MARK records, so that libraries and such have an easier time classifying our etexts. There are many more examples of this. Perhaps you should show your friends not the raw materials, but the end products. -- branko collin collin@xs4all.nl