Re: Books in Browsers Conference at Internet Archive

>so what can we learn?

 

Well, one would hope "we" all would learn that this is a big difference
between talking about a system that works, rather than actually producing a
system that actually works.

 

Also, note that the Oreilly system only "works" for those authors who choose
to publish at Oreilly.  Many more authors publish in ePUB and MOBI - I think
one could make the case that more book authors are publishing in MOBI than
in any other format worldwide.  Note that the Oreilly authors are techies
publishing techie manuals for real money - which means Oreilly can both
expect more from their authors as compared to volunteers, and it also
actually means that their targeted book space is much smaller than the range
of books and requirements that PG tackles.

 

http://oreilly.com/oreilly/author/index.html

 

Note that Oreilly is using DocBook Lite as its primary source language.
DocBook is a real standard, widely used and supported, and has actual
support for many features that that others here have been talking about for
many years, including direct generation from lightly marked up "ascii text
files."

 

The bad news is that by default these DocBook tools generate techie "K&R"
style manuals, rather than following standard attractive book formatting
rules -  if this was not tackled thoughtfully "we" would end up with much
great ugliness.

 

And again, what I have against these kinds of XML based solutions is
(excepting asciidoc) that it is basically going to require volunteers to get
a "real" XML editor such as Oxygen XML [which might be plausible given that
PG use might qualify for the "academic" pricing aka non-profit pricing.]
And then learn how to set up and use the editor, which has its own steep
learning curve.

 

Not sure at all how plausible this would be, rather than simply having PG
document a well-supported subset of HTML/EPUB/MOBI which PG commits to
actually supporting in a meaningful way.  IE if a volunteer commits to only
using the supported subset of HTML, then PG commits to making tools which
will actually work on that subset, to produce attractive, useful books that
others can actually read.

Then unsupported HTML passes through the sausage-maker - perhaps generating
"unsupported" warning messages - and the volunteer using the unsupported
bits of HTML? Well, they get what they get - and if what they get doesn't
work on one or another platform, then PG acts up to make it work.

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