Hi Jim, Am 06.02.2012 um 19:43 schrieb Jim Adcock:
Keith> You have not refuted the fact that PG is responsible for any particular format. PG does offer formats for reading, just like any good repository should.
A good repository offers multiple formats well-formatted and representative of the original book for reading on the devices that real-world customers want to read on. A goal which PG and most other "repositories" fail at once they start seeing themselves as "repositories" and not as active sources of real books for real people to actually read. From what I read so far from you there are no good repositories that fit your criteria!
Keith> That is not the purpose of PG. PG is there to preserve books and offer them to those willing to read.
"Willingness to read" depends on the flavor of the dog-food. When a non-profit loses a charismatic leader there is often an upheaval where the organization takes a look at itself and asks "what is our mission?" Now seems to be PG's turn.
Mr Hart fulfilled his dream. What he wanted was plain vanilla etexts. according to your definitions here, that is/was dog-food. As for reading the etexts/books from PG I can say my first was "The Twin Cities" and the DEVICE was a Newton. I converted and transferred it myself. Since then I have taken these texts and loaded then into different text processors and created my own PDFs. As of late I have taken up interest in the Ereader formats. They are not that bad compared to the commercial books you can buy. That is not books out of copyright, but freshly published books. I would say in many cases the PG style is better. Yes, PG is in transition. As in all transition things will become worst at first and there will be bumps in the road. Yet, in the end things get better.
Keith> Is that the fault of PG or someone else. You could just refactor the CSS. and VOILA.
Yes we could just refactor the CSS, and HTML5 and CSS3 provides the tools to do most of what we need to do cleanly and simply. Yet it is not happening at PG. Why not? Because the people who are in the position to in practice allow this to happen are instead blocking it from happening so that they can pursue their own agenda.
No! Because it is not the HTML and CSS that is the problem. It is the devices and their formats. The devices do a poor job of rendering because they do not even try to implement half of the HTML or CSS standards. PG simply can get hand tweak files for all of them! Who is to do the work. What PG can do though is create a master format that will allow the greatest flexibility and output EPUBs, MOBI, kf8s that are readable and for an absolutely non beatable price. regards Keith.