Steve Thomas wrote:
Nobody "needs" XML or PDF. They "need" the words of the book.
Nobody "needs" television or cars. All they "need" is a newspaper and a pair of shoes.
Very few people, I imagine, have the necessary tools to work with a TEI or SGML file.
TEI is not intended as end-user format. End-users should grab the generated HTML file.
Now, there's nothing wrong with the notion of converting all PG texts to some XML master format, and then exporting that to umpteen other formats on demand. [...] I'd estimate such a conversion task, for 10,000 books, to cost around $1,000,000 in salaries alone.
So think of what great value we would donate to the world.
Could it be better to put the PG effort into getting plain text editions out, and leave it to others to do the extra conversion to XML etc.? This is a model that has worked really very well for quite a few years, without complaint from any but a few tech-enthusiasts.
The main downside is that they mark up a *copy* of the text. When the original gets updated, the marked up copy falls out of sync and so all the generated formats. This problem can only be obviated if PG is to markup the original. -- Marcello Perathoner webmaster@gutenberg.org