two posts today that argue against cruft in e-books... michael quoted someone saying:

I love the PG site.  I’ve found the books to be the cleanest of all the sites that offer free e-books.  Not quite sure that “cleanest” is the right word, by it I mean that other than the PG wraparound information, there isn’t any extraneous stuff to try to read around.

travis said:

The fact that pg offers things in plain text is great, I can grab a book, put it in any format I like (or none at all for that matter) and know it will work with my system.

add in all the hassles of the different formats, and the ongoing struggle people have with d.r.m., and it's clear that the world will come to realize that file-formats which introduce markup into the text and/or wrap the text into a proprietary file-format are not doing us readers any favors. we want the text, the whole text, and nothing but the text. but what does "the whole text" mean? well, the one thing that's missing from p.g. e-texts is any reliable indication of the _structure_ of the book... that is, we cannot easily inform the computer where the headers are, and which parts are poems, or blockquotes, or footnotes, and which paragraphs should be rewrapped and which should not, and where any images should go, and so on... if p.g. e-texts contained that information, then we could build for travis the type of e-book reader-program which would allow him to read e-books without sighted assistance. and yes, z.m.l. _is_ that format. (i'm so glad you noticed.) so travis, since the contributions have dried up on the other "collaborative" project that "we" were doing, i can make myself available to collaborate with you on one... design the type of program you'd like -- completely -- and i'll see if i can make it work... you let me know, ok? -bowerbird