Quote:
Originally Posted by Elfwreck
Amazon has a budget that allows them to spend thousands of dollars designing software to convert files--and potentially catch problems in badly-made epubs.
If Smashwords accepted epubs, they'd get a rush of botched-conversion files and a bunch of angry posts from authors demanding to know either "why won't your system take my wonderful document?" or "howcome the version that's made available looks so crappy and has the wrong metadata and has page numbers and headers getting in the way?" (Ans 1: because you didn't run it through an epub checker; Ans 2: because you got an auto-OCR'd PDF of your out-of-print book from a friend, and you ran it through Calibre's convert-to-epub without looking at the results.)
They'd *also* get a number of wonderfully-formatted epubs with features that SW doesn't currently support. But they don't have the resources to tackle the headaches and complaints from the ones who botch the process.
|
Aren't they already getting that with MeatGrinder, though? Only the question is "why won't your system take my wonderful WORD document?"
Given epubs (easy to validate) and Word documents that have to adhere to a strict set of rather arbitrary "easy-to-transform" rules, I know which one I'd rather deal with.