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