Re: [gutvol-d] blah blah blah blah blah

So what are you suggesting? I can't imagine people out there saying to themselves"This is simple; I think I'll make it complicated." or"This is complicated. I think I'll oversimplify it." What is a constructive suggestion? Sent from my Phone From: James Adcock Sent: 10/5/2012 9:51 AM To: Project Gutenberg Volunteer Discussion; Tapio Riikonen Subject: Re: [gutvol-d] blah blah blah blah blah
Books are complex beasts, and not always easy to typeset or encode.
We have a lot of books which are pretty simple, and could fit into a common methodology which should be able to run successfully "everywhere." We have a few books which are very complicated, and are not going to fit into a common methodology, at least not one which we can teach or motivate the average volunteer to use. There is a strong countercurrent however, who want to take simple things and make them complicated, and well as another thread who want to take complicated things and oversimplify them. _______________________________________________ gutvol-d mailing list gutvol-d@lists.pglaf.org http://lists.pglaf.org/mailman/listinfo/gutvol-d

So what are you suggesting? I can't imagine people out there saying to themselves"This is simple; I think I'll make it complicated." or"This is complicated. I think I'll oversimplify it."
I see people on this thread saying this all the time: "My solution is the ONLY solution because it has enough power to do all the books." "My solution is the ONLY solution because it is simple enough that any volunteer can do it." Look, there are some really complicated books out there which probably should be done in PDF or TeX. But about 90% of the time what I am seeing is really simple books, a novel or a memoir, made almost exclusively out of paragraphs of simply European language text, with maybe a cover image, maybe a few illustrations, a title page, chapter headings and subheadings, maybe a chapter quote or poem, maybe an embedded "Dear John" letter, maybe an embedded poem or two. This is not rocket science folks! And guess what: PG and DP are still getting these things wrong! IE things almost always look passable on most desktop HTML browsers, while at the same time are almost always displaying large formatting errors on EPUB and/or MOBI readers. So why can we not get together and figure out a practical solution to fixing all these broken "dirt simple" books ??? Its not hard to write a simple book in HTML that works on pretty much all devices. But what is happening instead is that people are working really really hard to turn these dirty simple books into something that DOESN'T work on pretty much all devices. Once people become enthralled by geeking around with all the little bits and pieces of machinery inside HTML then guess what they create something which doesn't work. Why are they doing this? A: Vanity.

On Fri, Oct 5, 2012 at 12:47 PM, James Adcock <jimad@msn.com> wrote:
So what are you suggesting? I can't imagine people out there saying to themselves"This is simple; I think I'll make it complicated." or"This is complicated. I think I'll oversimplify it."
I see people on this thread saying this all the time:
"My solution is the ONLY solution because it has enough power to do all the books."
"My solution is the ONLY solution because it is simple enough that any volunteer can do it."
The people on this thread for the most part aren't producing those ebooks you don't like, so your point doesn't apply.
The people I know producing this stuff don't do much more than they need to in order to get an ebook out. I suspect it may not be rocket science, but this universal simple html you speak of isn't something they are familiar with.
So why can we not get together and figure out a practical solution to fixing all these broken "dirt simple" books ???
Ummm... they are not here, they at at DP.
Its not hard to write a simple book in HTML that works on pretty much all devices. But what is happening instead is that people are working really really hard to turn these dirty simple books into something that DOESN'T work on pretty much all devices. Once people become enthralled by geeking around with all the little bits and pieces of machinery inside HTML then guess what they create something which doesn't work.
Why are they doing this? A: Vanity.
And if you go over there and explain to them that they know how to do good word but they don't and the reason is because they are too vain, I'm not sure you'd get a warm reception; and I don't see the evidence you are correct.
participants (2)
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don kretz
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James Adcock