I've been laying low for the last 2+ years, but I haven't been sitting around doing nothing.
On the backend, I've been building and rebuilding the tools I use every day to create, build and manage ebooks for various devices and platforms. (I've also been focusing on my divorce
and building a life with my beautiful young daughter
).
As some of you may know, I have a very long history of building ebooks and "mobile reading" resources going back at least 7 years now with
Plucker,
Sitescooper and other projects.
So I've come to an impasse... and am about to relaunch some tools and services I took offline a few years ago due to some external abuses of them.
One question remains:
What is the legality of converting one format to another? What I mean is, if someone sends me a .chm file, and I turn that into an
Adobe PDF or a
Plucker document, or any other format (TomeRaider, iLiad, etc.), is that legal?
I see a lot of people dancing around the issues related to using
libchm,
ConvertLIT, and other tools, but there doesn't seem to be any single definitive answer about their use.
There have been some
exclusions to the DMCA which at first glance, appear to offer some leeway with respect to converting into and out of these formats, but it is written somewhat vaguely.
So let me pose another question:
If you could convert anything to anything, what would you want to see first?HTML => {Plucker,iSilo,TomeRaider}
CHM => {HTML, PDF, Text, mobile formats}
PDF => {HTML, mobile formats}
What about Sony LRF? Rocketbook? iRex iLiad? iPhone? iPod?
Which formats are high on your "I must have it" list?