Quote:
Originally Posted by JSWolf
That's BS. There's no reason an ePub could not be uploaded directly and run through a validation check and if it passes, accept it.
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Not saying that's impossible, but I can think of several reasons why they might choose not to do that:
1. It's not all about epub. They have a system designed to take a pretty universal writing-document format (Word) and turn it into a variety of ebook formats. They do it quickly, they do it for free, they do it for a huge number of books, and they do a fairly good job of it (if you don't count the .pdb, which comes out awful). It's a single workflow that applies to all submissions.
2. If they wanted to set up a separate workflow for people submitting epubs, they could do what you suggest. Pubit does this. But that wouldn't do anything to guarantee better ebooks. Most people would probably either continue to submit Word docs, or run their docs through Calibre (which is what I do), and produce epubs that might or might not pass validation checks.
(I'm chagrined to say that my epub of Sunborn's international edition, produced that way, flunked epub validation--whereas the meatgrinder output passed with flying colors.)
3. There always has to be a third reason, but now I've forgotten what I was going to say.
I'm not praising their system as perfect; I'm just saying it works pretty okay for a large number of people. Probably they'll make it better one of these days.