Feel free to spin up a separate effort, of course. However, I am still optimistic about the feasibility of the approach I outlined a year or so ago (?) of having a user-contributed area, with something like a TRAC for variations. Crowdsourcing errata and variations. Making this scalable is challenging. Doing it so that minimal changes are needed to the existing PG structure is key. (And, especially, so I can't be a bottleneck in the process. I hate that.) I'm pretty sure I've written all of this before. Coming up with a *scalable* approach is a bigger challenge than (so far) people have been able to demonstrate. Summing up, I encourage building the better system (or the system that fills gaps in the current system). Trying to change the current system is likely to remain difficult. If the better system is good enough, maybe THAT can become "the" system. (And then, in two or three years, people will be telling whoever designed that new system that their approach is ossified, and to get out of the way of progress, etc. :) -- Greg On Mon, Feb 11, 2013 at 07:46:38PM +0000, Jon Hurst wrote:
On 2013-02-11, Jon Hurst wrote:
OK, I'll do that... I assume you will be doing the same for your RST derived "better books" rather than trying to get them into the PG library? Let me know the URLs because I'm interested in trying them out.
On reflection, there is, of course, no chance that PG could pull off something like this. I obviously woke up in an over-optimistic frame of mind. And if I'm honest, I have passed the point that I actually care that PG customers get sucky ebooks. Greg, Marcello and the WWers have claimed ownership of that issue.
What I do care about is that _I_ am getting sucky ebooks. DP produced books are an order of magnitude better in terms of quality, and I would love to see DP do its own library, but nearly all the books that I actually want to read were done prior to DP getting fully up to speed. I can and will do something about this by helping to produce the buried reworks. Those work fine for me and everyone else on this list, since we know the secret to finding them. Let the customers have crap -- it'll be more bandwidth for us.
The missing piece of the puzzle for me is properly formatted versions of these reworks. I can, of course, spend an hour fixing up a book, and if there is no other choice I will do so, but if someone else has already done a book and I like what they have done I would prefer to use that hour for reading.
So here is what I propose. I will create a properly formatted epub, mobi and PDF for each rework that I am involved in producing. I will publish these in a small library somewhere cheap. If you email me I will give you a URL for this library. Feel free to rework what I have done; I will not be upset. If you have a library of properly formatted ebooks, please send me a link. If I rework what you have done, please don't be upset. If sufficient people are interested, we'll work out some sort of catalogue. The aim is not to take over the Internet. The aim is to have access to non-sucky ebooks.
Regards
Jon
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