jim said:
personal attacks
it's clear to everyone that i am "attacking" your ideas, and it has absolutely nothing to do with you as a person, jim. everyone. including you. you're just doing a dodge, as you have no answers to my questions... if you did, as you have just shown, you would be jumping in with both feet, as soon as you could. but your position is now in complete shambles, jim, so don't fret. this won't last much longer... everyone with a brain who is paying attention now knows exactly why .html will not work as a "master-format" for project gutenberg, and the people without brains who are not paying any attention don't need to be of any concern. *** jim said:
Can someone please add the download counts for PDF format files to this location, so that BB can see how compelling the actual PG customer base finds his rhetoric? ... If you want to put PDF up on PG BB, who is stopping you? Certainly not me.
did you notice how fast jim responds when he thinks he _has_ a response? so his non-answers on the hard questions become ever-more-telling by the minute... and of course, even those times where jim _thinks_ he has an answer are misleading, due to his poor reading comprehension... i'm sure none of you were confused, so please pardon me while i 'splain things to jim, so he knows he can't play this little trick on us where he pretends that he doesn't understand, _or_ so he will know exactly what i did and did not say in case he _really_ didn't understand... i did _not_ say p.g. should create .pdfs. as i have repeated endlessly, i do not give a smelly rat's ass what p.g. does... i _am_ talking about people using my tool to create .pdfs for their own personal use, customized to their specific preferences... most specifically tomorrow's self-publishers and their fans with a wide mix of hardware... read those last two paragraphs again, jim. and then again, and then again and again, until they sink in, and you understand 'em. so i don't have to repeat them again later... as for download numbers, they are funny... yes, the download totals for .pdf at p.g. will be anemic. because p.g. rarely offers a .pdf version, as we are all quite aware... (the fact that jim evidently considers this to be meaningful information is a great indication how sound his judgment is.) but there are other places we can look at... take feedbooks.com, for instance. for a time, a very, very, very long time, .pdf downloads dominated the total. it became embarrassing for hadrien, who runs the site, because he is a staunch advocate of the .epub file-format... so what did he do? he made it so the default download format is .epub. he assumed, and rightly so, that downloaders probably had _some_ app that would display an .epub file, so if they downloaded an .epub, it would be opened by that app, and voila, there it was... now, to get a .pdf, or any other file-format, you have to forego the "download" button, which is the obvious choice, doncha think?, and click on the book's title to be taken to a list of possible formats you can download. (and there's _nothing_ to indicate that's so, so i bet many of his users don't know that.) so, guess what happened? go ahead, guess! that's right! his .epub downloads soared, and the .pdf ones went down, so that _now_ .epub downloads outnumber the .pdf ones. now hadrien regularly touts his .epub totals. haha. nice trick, hadrien. so download numbers don't mean much to me. but there's another wrinkle here as well... i had to actually go and visit the nook website and the kobo website to see if those machines would read .pdf. i honestly did not remember. heck, i'm not sure if i ever knew it to begin with. and i'm someone who actively follows this stuff! so, if i were a newbie buying a kobo or a nook, i might well be perfectly flummoxed about what kind of files it could read. and since all of the e-bookstores are selling .epub files -- because that's "the e-book open standard" -- i would soon come to look for that file-format myself, without even realizing that my machine could display a .pdf file just fine. and even if i _did_ remember, and tried to load a .pdf, odds are that it would've been created by some _idiot_ who used the "standard" 8.5*11 pagesize and thus made the .pdf unreadable on an e-reader. so i would "conclude" that ".pdf doesn't work", and i would go back to using the .epub format. and i might never even come to know the fact that i could prepare my own .pdf, to my custom preferences, to a pagesize based on my machine, that could well work _far_better_ than the vast majority of .epubs being produced at this time. but once they get my one-click conversion tool, these newbies might get a lot smarter, very fast... -bowerbird