On Mon, 22 May 2006, David H. Rothman wrote:
Actually that's http://www.dotreader.com , not .org --mea culpa--and if PG really cares about open source, then it should encourage strong open source efforts of the OSoft variety rather than just wait until they catch on.
However, Mr. Rothman does not take his own advice here, but only supports the particular open source projects that support him.
Here's a little two-man software house in Tacoma, Washington, gambling hundreds of thousands of dollars on an open-source reader that can do far more than Plucker, allowing blogs and forums to be embedded inside books.
Again, Mr. Rothman should take his own advice. . .if he were really doing his bit to suport this "little two-man software house in Tacoma" he would not be mentioning them as anonymous creatures sitting behind keyboards.
Plucker has many appreciative users, but dotReader/OpenReader will be of far greater importance to commercial publishers, who are already starting to show interest.
This is what everyone says about every project. Let's not confuse the press releases with reality. BTW, some people are totally amazed at how many Plucker files we send out. I got an independent comment on that earlier this week. However, to address Mr. Rothman's point that we should promote this one particular piece of open source programming, with or without the hundreds of thousands of dollars he mentioned, with or without programmers' names, Project Gutenberg is not in the business of establising businesses. However, on the other hand, if Mr. Rothman were to read the Newsletters, he would know that it is only one stop to putting in an announcement. "Better to light a single candle, than to curse the darkness."
In turn, that'll be wonderful for PG works and other public domain books. dotReader reader can work with many kinds of books while improving the user experience.
dotReader uses a turbocharged version of existing e-book standards that techies and publishers have thrashed aroundfor years.
And this means. . .. ?
It's the best of all worlds: open source for programmers and a powerful free reader for users--and e-book standards similar to existing ones for publishers. Plus, dotReader can handle other XML/CSS-related formats as well.
Similar? Will it be able to use these similar files?
We serverd 89504 plucker books in May 2006.
I think you'll do much better with OpenReader available as well. OSoft's e-reader for the format is a thing of beauty, and, as noted, it'll be free to download.
So is Adobe Acrobat Reader.