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lexicon:
conversion software is essentially reader software,. .. so what you're saying confirms my point. to write a valid conforming from-epub converter, I have to be able to parse at least two different kinds of content files.
kovidgoyal:
sure, if I write the converter that converts to epub, I can control where I put my metadata, but if I'm storing all my files as epub and I get one that's already epub, I'm not going to have any idea if someone else consistently put the same metadata in every place that metadata could possibly be stored. I might also be inclined to use someone elses conversion software when/if it exists. If I find conflicting metadata in some file, I might not even have a programatic way to guess things like what the correct title is.
I'd have to solve this problem in a epub->dtbook converter anyways, but why add to the problem?
likewise if I turn a DTBook into an epub book, by essentially putting it in a zip and renaming it, I know *less,* not more about what I have in that zip file, since hence-forth it might be a DTBook and might be XHTML. That seems to only add confusion, so I think I'd rather just keep books in DTBook format if I can get them there. If I decide later that epub is a better format than DTBook, ... conversion from DTBook should be as trivial as a few lines of shell script.
since DTBook practically is epub, it shouldn't be significantly more difficult to convert to dtbook than to epub. The only added difficulty is that I'm constrained to converting to one format, instead of sporadically converting to either of two formats. I'd rather convert consistently to one format than either of two. If I have two formats of files and for consistency convert them into something that might be one or might be the other of two other file formats, .... that just sounds like an exercise in futility.
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