Marcello, I own both a Nook and a Kindle. You can make an attractive and usable book for either or both, but it won't take advantage of everything you can do with HTML and style sheets because those devices support a limited subset of HTML. When I make an HTML document I want to make it look like the original book. If I have that then I can reissue a book using a print on demand service like Lulu. As far as HTML is concerned, I just want the basic structural tags with decent style sheet support. Nothing fancy. A web page should look good on a full size screen or a printed page. An EPUB needs to look good on a small device. It is natural to start out with a good looking web page and then tweak it to look good on a Kindle. It only takes a few hours to do, but it isn't something you can just do automatically. You probably could do some kind of simple HTML that would look decent on both, but to make full use of each platform you need to tweak by hand. "Crowdsourcing" is one of those things that sounds good in theory but doesn't work in practice. I have worked on books for FLOSS Manuals which are a good example of crowdsourcing. One of the manuals I wrote was translated into Spanish by a team of South American volunteers. In all cases we made sure that there was a way to identify who did what work so that person got credit. Wanting credit is not wrong. Wanting to take control over what an entire book looks like is not wrong. It's the way the world works. Having the OPTION of submitting a hand crafted EPUB in addition to my web page gives me a way of delivering a quality product on every platform. If you do a good EPUB you can generate a good MOBI so there is no need to submit those separately. As things currently stand, I do my best on the two documents I submit, but what most readers will download will NOT be my best, and in some cases will look downright sloppy. James Simmons On Sat, Jan 28, 2012 at 9:10 AM, Marcello Perathoner <marcello@perathoner.de> wrote:
On 01/28/2012 02:53 PM, James Simmons wrote:
I agree with this. Granted, an EPUB starts out as an HTML document but to make a good EPUB you really need to do tweaks that cannot be done automatically.
What HTML? HTML 4, HTML 5, HTML 6?
What EPUB? EPUB 2, EPUB 3, EPUB 4?
This is so WYSIWYG, so pedestrian, so typewriter, so oblivious of the capacities of computers and the rapid change of ereading landscape.
This is the complete opposite of having a master format.
I want the option to submit a hand crafted EPUB along with my HTML and TXT. I want it to be my own work, not the efforts of a bunch of people.
This is so 90's, so `me´-generation, so Girl Scout Merit Badge. I want *my* name all over the place, I want *my* bragging rights, I want nobody to mess with my work because I'm the paragon of evolution.
This is the complete opposite of crowdsourcing.
Rather than have an HTML file that avoids features of HTML so it can make a decent EPUB, I want to have both HTML and EPUB be the best they can be.
This is so `best viewed with IE4´ and `best viewed with Netscape´.
This is the complete opposite of future proof.
-- Marcello Perathoner webmaster@gutenberg.org
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