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"In order to publish your work" isn't all that clear; when both the headline and the post itself say "e-readers" it's not even slightly obvious that the writer doesn't actually mean e-readers, but rather means online bookstores. The natural assumption is that she does, indeed, mean what she repeatedly said: e-readers.
And the "maybe I wasn't clear with my question" post was what I found insulting. She did not, in that post, clarify that despite her title and content, she was not actually talking about e-readers; she just said the same thing again, as if I could understand better it if she said it more (in person, she'd probably say it louder). "Sorry, I meant bookstores, not e-readers" would have been a clarification. Saying the same thing again was ... not.
If there was sufficient clarity in her first post to know what she meant -- in other words, that by saying "e-readers" instead of "bookstores" she actually meant bookstores instead of e-readers -- then why did anyone answer the question she asked instead of the one she thought of? It wasn't until her fourth post that she demonstrated she was really talking about bookstores, at which point Jehane explained the difference. Before that, it looked like she was accustomed to dealing with devices through some program that required an ISBN as part of its data, and would not accept a book without one, and thought that was a requirement of the device itself, so she wanted to know what e-readers wouldn't have the problem.
And as for publishing ... if I put this post in PDF format on my website, I've published it as an ebook. I doubt if anyone would want it, but I've published it just the same. No ISBN. My e-reader, a Sony PRS-505, could read it. So when she talked about publishing a book, and what e-readers don't require ISBNs, that was the sort of scenario that came to mind (though of course with something more substantive than a random MR comment!) and led, again, back to the topic of the thread: e-readers.
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