I did some checking too. The conclusion I provisionally have arrived at is that there are relatively few beneficiaries from our expectations for an increasingly elegant HTML version of each project which also is one of the major drags on the post-processing stage and a major contributor in the increasing residency period of projects on DP. It appears to me that the only people who enjoy the full pleasure of our finest work are a.) those who read the whole thing online at PG, and b) those who personally download the HTML version and install it locally so they can read it with a device (probably a PC full-width screen (including laptops and similar.) Which would be - what - 10% or less? In fact, it appears that secondary distributors treat the removal of all or part of the HTML as part of their value-add. Don On Fri, Apr 16, 2010 at 4:52 PM, James Adcock <jimad@msn.com> wrote:
Does anyone know of any epublisher other than PG that *does* distribute the html we provide?
Not sure exactly what you are asking but Apple for example takes the PG html, strips out the PG legalize and acknowledgment of the volunteers, converts it to EPUB with DRM, and redistributes it “free” [where “Free” in this case means being only able to get then book in DRM form and only being able to get it directly from the Steve Jobs iPad monopoly] One knows they are not working from the txt versions of the files because the Apple redistributions contains chars and formatting found only in the HTML versions. FreeKindleBooks redistributes in HTML form converted to MOBI and retaining all the PG legalize and requirements. Mobileread has volunteers which take the HTML usually heavily reformat it, strip it, and republish in MOBI and EPUB formats while cackling about how much better their versions are! Many other sites appear to “down-convert” to a least-common-denominator ASCII format before “up-converting” back to HTML, MOBI, EPUB, etc. Presumably they are working from an ASCII version of an old DVD distribution – getting “working” EPUB and MOBI from the HTML formats tends to be “non-trivial”, not to mention that some sites republish in say two dozen different formats.
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