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Old 01-25-2008, 02:41 PM   #17
kovidgoyal
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Hadrien View Post
Not sure about this for Mobipocket Creator, the one time I tried this software for RSS feeds, it even displayed comments on the Techcrunch feeds. It was full-content, but with too much content in this case (unlike the PRS-500/505, the TOC is not as convenient on the Cybook, with a nested TOC on the Sony it's very easy to browse through items in a newspaper).
As for full-content feeds: some people already republish partial content feeds into full content feeds (those are available for the BBC). I really think that what you're doing with the content extraction Kovid could be useful to a lot of people, some of them would like to have full-content feeds on their Netvibes, iPhone etc... I really wonder why you don't switch to this approach instead of just the Sony Reader. There's also some easy content extractors available like Dapper, and I hope that in the near future, any user without programming skills will be able to create their own extraction system (or that most websites will understand that they should provide full content feeds with ads).

Concerning the Amazon feature: it's a push system, instead of a pull one. People with limited technical skills might find it worth paying for those blogs, if they get them automatically every morning. That's not my case, but we're not really "average users" around here.
Well, my development work is motivated primarily by what I need, hence the support for SONY. Of course libprs500 is completely modular in design, so adding other output formats to the content extractor in the future only requires writing an html->whatever format plugin. At the moment, I don't need any other output format, so...

But if SONY ever supports epub I'll probably write html2epub.

I get the advantages of a push system, but the thing I dislike about Amazon's current implementation is that there is no flexibility. They don't seem to want to cater to the needs of power users at all. For instance, if they started a web service where users with a little skill could easily create feeds (like I do with libprs500 or you do with feedbooks), and then publish them to the wider community, that would mean access to a lot of new content. Note that I'm not saying SONY is any better, just that thanks to their first mover advantage, the tools exists to let people make full use of the potential of an ebook reading device.
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