Tapio,

I haven't done as many books as you, but I've done a few and donated page images to DP for several more.  I have done exactly as you suggest.  After seeing the inadequate EPUB and MOBI formatted files PG distributes I made my own versions and put them on archive.org and amazon.com.  A LOT of people have downloaded my books from PG; hardly any from archive.org and amazon.  So a lot of people are getting poorly formatted books when they don't have to.

The Kindle isn't just the latest toy.  Neither is the Nook.  Lots of people have these.  I have both.  You can make a nicely formatted EPUB for the Nook, run it through kindlegen, and have a nicely formatted MOBI.  Any new toy that comes out will probably support EPUB.  It is just silly to pretend that these two formats aren't the most important e-book formats there are.

It seems to me that you could have a process that doesn't put too much of a burden on the whitewashers by encouraging the use of the RST master format and polishing up the EPUB generator that works off this format.  In addition to improving the generated EPUB you could do the following:

1).  Change the standard on what to do with illustrations so that illustrations in "landscape format" be allowed to remain in that formatted.  Rotating them to be the right way up makes sense for HTML but not for e-book readers.

2).  Add some kind of directive to the RST format to specify content that only belongs in a specific output format.  For instance, you could specify that a section of ASCII art family tree tables should only go in the text format.  A rotated picture might only go in HTML, and unrotated only in EPUB and Kindle formats.  You might have differently formatted poetry in the web and EPUB versions.

James Simmons


On Thu, Oct 4, 2012 at 1:38 AM, Tapio Riikonen <tapri32@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Jeroen,

Isn't your 'extorsion attempt' a bit off the mark? Why not go on
submitting to PG in the usual way, and put your nice epubs on some
other site? We cannot expect PG to offer too many varieties of their
texts; there will always be new toys for which people want to have
special formats.

I have submitted over 700 books to PG, and my solution has always been
the following:

1. Submit well-proofed and standardised 8-bit texts with mark-up for
italics, poetry, letters etc.

2. Generated html (re Marcello) is quite sufficient in 98 % of the
cases. Not too pretty, but functional.

3. In special cases I must prepare the html version myself. Page
numbers are included only when there is some academic reason for them,
dropcaps etc. never.

I've never had any clashes with whitewashers, they've always been very
diplomatic and co-operative even with my mistakes.

Most people on this list, to be sure, consider my work to be complete
trash and worthless, but I know better. In the Nordic countries, 'text
is king', other formats are nice additions.

The old 7-bit ASCII was an abomination, but I'm still grateful to Greg
for talking Michael around and accepting 8-bit text. Now utf-8 is even
better.

PG is a repository of digitised books with emphasis on pure text. Why?
Michael thought far ahead; look how other formats are changing the
whole time, and that's why you continue to have your religious wars
without end or solution (I'm not going to be involved!).

So, let's work more and talk less.

Tapio


2012/10/3 Jeroen Hellingman <jeroen@bohol.ph>:
>
>
> If my not-dumbed-down for the lowest denominator readers HTMLs would
> become no-longer accepted, I will no longer submit anything to PG, but
> set-up my own ebook site with like minded people. You can only ask that
> much from volunteers who work hard to produce nice things. I've
> submitted over 500 books so far.
>
> Jeroen.
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