david rothman, a.k.a. the idiot, said:

if you count used PDAs

you were never talking about _used_ equipment. no, you were talking about _new_ equipment that sold in sufficient numbers that the price dropped. never mind the contradiction that big numbers mean strong demand, which mitigates _against_ a price-drop. you thought the prediction that tech products would always drop in price was a safe one to make. you happened to be wrong. so now you're trying to shift the argument, and making yourself look more ridiculous in doing so.

I won't claim a Bowerbird level of infallibility, far from it

good thing you're not "claiming" it, because you don't have anything close to it. you're miles away.

I won't claim a Bowerbird level of infallibility, far from it, but consider this little prediction that I published in Computerworld in 1992-- about hardware in 2020:

so your 30-year prediction in 1992 was off a bit, _by_10_years_. yet another cracked crystal ball. and thus you show that you make the errors that most people make -- overestimating the changes that occur in the short-term, and underestimating the ones that occur in the long-term. c'est la vie. ordinarily, i wouldn't care about your predictions. but you were _so_ adamant -- and _so_ wrong -- and lambasted anyone who disagreed with you... (and then _banned_ us when we dared to persist.) anyone who goes back and reads that old thread will see that you actually tried to argue that you were _right_. and -- when that failed miserably -- you said, "come back in a year and see who's right". so i came back the next year, and i was still right, and you were still wrong. and then i came back the year after that, and i was _still_ right, and you were _still_ wrong. and even now, i'm still right, and you're still wrong. and you're still trying to weasel out of the thing... and yet you _still_ seem to think that if you only post some message in return, you will confuse us, and we won't notice that you were wrong all along. the days when bluster and bombing were routine on this listserve have long since passed, mr. idiot.

Meanwhile I'd suggest that you and your pals repair your own crystal balls, given the rise of the standard ePub format for e-books.

i was _hoping_ you would bring that up, david. hoping and hoping and hoping and hoping... because yes, you were wrong about that one too, and wrong in exactly the way i said you would be. after all, it was easy for me to predict, since the _first_ wave of the .epub format (known then as "open-book") had shown exactly what'd happen, when microsoft wrapped it in proprietary d.r.m. so that's what i predicted would happen again... it makes perfect business sense, and when you're dealing with businesses, that's what they will do... and sure enough, that's exactly what happened... right now, adobe has their own version of .epub, one which they've wrapped in proprietary d.r.m. and apple has _their_ own version of .epub as well, one they have wrapped in _their_ proprietary d.r.m. plus there's scrollmotion, and kobo, and nook... and who knows what google is going to do? so do we have the interoperability _you_ promised? no, we don't. because you were stupid enough to think that interoperability resided in the _format_ itself... and you weren't smart enough to know you had to disallow all d.r.m. wrappers to get interoperability. so now we are stuck with an unnecessarily difficult file-format that gives none of the promised benefits. so big "congratulations" on your "accomplishment".

Why does Bowerbird's silliness go on, year after year?

because we made a 5-year bet, which i check in on every 6 months, just to see how things are going... you can bet (if you'd like to _win_ a bet sometime) that -- once we've hit the 5-year mark -- i will be happy to never ever mention your idiocy here again. as long as you stay away, i'll be happy to forget you.

he wanted my TeleRead site to promote his own technology

oh please. "promotion" from a know-nothing idiot like you would be the kiss of death for a good idea.

and he hated talk from Jon Noring and me of an industry standard.

neither you nor noring knew what you blathered about. but jon knew a _little_ bit, at least about the markup... you, on the other hand, knew absolutely nothing at all. you just went on the basis of what "sounded good" and a flock of idiots believed you because it "sounded good". as far as "an industry standard" goes, why would we want to let the dinosaur publishers make the rules the mammals have to follow? never understood that. but i never argued that one standard is a bad idea... i _did_ say that it would have to be a _good_ standard, but that wouldn't seem to be an unreasonable caveat... and face it, anything that gets wrapped in d.r.m. can _never_ be called "an open standard". by definition. yet you routinely said "i disapprove of d.r.m., _but_ if the publishers won't go electronic without it, then we have to kowtow to them". well, i got news for you. the corporations will drag their feet on d.r.m. forever, or until you force them to stop. so force them to stop. oh, i forgot, you were too busy kissing their stinky feet.

Our OpenReader initiative led the main e-book industry trade group to get serious about consumer-level standards

the sad thing is that you and jon actually believe that...

But at least with ePub we're part of the way there.

we're halfway to hell, that's where we are. maybe 3/5ths. but once the corporations exit the publishing sphere, and they are no longer propping up their little format, then we'll see if mammals can turn the direction around. however, in the meantime, do you know what we've got? we've got a return to the time of "browser incompatibilities". that's right. those good old days where you had to fine-tune everything you did to each specific browser, e.g., "this site best viewed in specify-a-browser here." in spite of the fact that we have "an industry standard", every viewer-program implements the thing differently. the (badly inferior) adobe program does things one way, and the apple ibooks program does things yet another way, and who even bothers with the sony, and nook, and kobo? this is more of the _crap_ that the publishing industry is throwing on the e-book sphere, so as to disable it... the paper-printers don't _want_ e-books to succeed, because they know it spells the end of their big money, so they try to hobble it with every obstacle they can find. and david rothman has been right there, helping 'em out, whether he knew it or not. (and for the most part, did not.)

Bowerbird's "observer" friend has probably sold thousands of dollars of books in the very format that was to fade away.

only because apple adopted .epub, to please the dinosaurs, and as diversionary tactic aimed at injuring amazon's kindle. but in one year, when the agency model comes up for review, corporate publishers will learn what the music people learned, which is that apple won't tolerate their bull-crap for very long. then things will get interesting...

Gasp, PG offers ePub among other formats

congratulations, you've got marcello on your side... yes, i'm really heartbroken i was unable to draft him.

and Apple has turned thousands of Gutenberg classics into ePub books for the iPad.

which, sorry, you cannot put on a kindle. or even on a sony. or a kobo. or a nook. so much for overcoming the file-format "problem"...

He'll very possibly be amusing us on schedule in another six months or so.

you mean on november 30, when the bet concludes? well now, that would be fully appropriate, wouldn't it? so if i'm not here to flaunt it, i hope _someone_ will... -bowerbird