Quote:
Originally Posted by neilmarr
*The folks here are readers and/or writers. My clan.
*I come here to learn from experts and 'amateurs' (I use that word in its original sense -- passionate lovers of an ideal).
*I come here to contribute what little I can.
*I come here for members' generosity of thought and advice, for their differing insights, for their wit and intelligence ... yep, for the virtual friendship, too. That is very high on my list of 'Whys'.
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Mmm, some of all of those. Plus, I can chatter about OCR software idiosyncrasies and PDF formatting and the weirdness of copyright law without being shushed for being to technical and without needing to be a lawyer to be taken seriously. (Lawyers have more accurate understandings of the law, generally. But my understanding is still relevant--those laws affect me; if I can't understand them, I can't follow them. And I'm not buying the corporate attitude of "we'll tell you how it's legal to use our products.")
I love the acceptance for all kinds of ebook reading devices, all kinds of formats. Yeah, we get into big "X will be the ultimate everybody format someday" discussions, but there's no (well, little) disparagement of people who choose other formats... if you prefer .rb, there's support for making them & people will help you find resources for your reader.
I love the endless copyright/piracy debates. And the endless typography debates. I like recurring topics that get revisted every time a new bit of software comes out, or every time a new legal ruling comes down. I like that people are willing to repeat their views a thousand times to newcomers who haven't spent the last ten years figuring out how ebooks worked.
I like that even people who intensely disagree on a lot of issues can agree on other aspects of ebooks; that we don't get "cliques" as much as "overlapping factions." The ePub fanatics don't all agree on downloading; the torrent users don't all agree that typography is pointless; the Kindle users don't all agree about DRM.