Quote:
Originally Posted by Wrong Writer
What bothers me is the "not for sale" part. If you plan on offering work for sale is there another version to use, or is this device only for amateurs?
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eScape is a free product and there is no plan to make it commercial. It's designed for people interested in making free books for themselves and their friends, or even the greater public. If we get enough requests for a commercial version we may consider it. We don't really see this as a viable commercial product with out a lot more options. We did it purely because we could, and to address a challenge made on the Teleread blog. The development had the skills and components to bolt it together pretty quickly in their own time, mostly from our existing code components. The hardest part was learning the quirks of OO XHTML generation.
We have a professional Product
IGP:FLIP (Front List Interactive Publishing), that obviously costs money to use and supports commercial models. It does a lot more such as creates print PDF, ePub, Online books, plus packages for Mobipocket, MS Reader and Palm Reader. It supports images, maths (with difficulty), SVG, Indexing, auto hyperlinking, notes/footnotes, etc. We are not trying to push that here as the spirit of Mobileread is sharing and support. That was just to answer your query on is there a commercial version.
eScape uses the Structure-Styling approach and is designed to demonstrate how the XHTML needs to be consistent for maximum value. From that perspective it is bossy. Then all changes can be made on the CSS. This is a radically different approach to most of the talk we see on the forum where there is a constant struggle with the smallest HTML issues for various reasons, and ePub packaging is onerous. eScape eliminates that struggle in return for a little discipline applying styles, then you can get as creative as you like with styles. For more information on this approach there is an informative white paper on XHTML for publishing
here.