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Originally Posted by ATimson
The former would be malicious, as you're accusing them of - they'd be doing more work so less books work. The latter is just being lazy and not adding a feature (which every developer is guilty of to some extent or another.)
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Precisely what I'm doing. The epub spec exists for a reason. It would be like me writing an application that, instead of using the file attributes that are always saved to any file header by the OS, completely ignored them and instead used the same data but only if it was saved in a proprietary format in some hidden location. Either they're stupid or they're malicious.
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Depends - which would you rather they do, edit every publisher's ebooks to include the metadata, or just handle it all on their own without mucking with the publisher's file?
I know which one I'd prefer, and it doesn't involve the store thinking they know better than the publisher. (That way lies Wal-Mart's music CDs...)
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The publisher has enough brains to print the summary on the back of a hardcover book. Regardless, they already edit the publisher's metadata for the title, author, publisher, etc. fields. We know this because these fields
are already recognized and read for sideloaded books.
So, here are some simple facts without any speculation - several metadata fields
are read from the epub file.
Only the summary is not read from the epub file. Yet, it is read (from a hidden location - this has been verified from rooted nooks for the nook 1 by the way) for ONLY the books purchased ota from the B&N store. This is the worst possible I can think of to implement something. Again - ignorant or malicious. Ignorance has not been an excuse since the 1st release of the nook1 - people have been crying about this since then. I rest my case.
Of course, it makes perfect sense from a business standpoint (which is why I'm even more convinced of the marketing boffins' hand in this). B&N's target audience is not a tech-savvy one. Most people will gladly (and I would agree with them) just do the convenient thing and buy directly from B&N. The large space reservation for B&N content in the main memory is yet another piece of the puzzle.
*shrug* These are merely statements of fact. If I or someone else has such a problem with this, that's what rooting is for. As yet, the lack of summary is not a big deal since there are ways around it. I like keeping my library organized in Calibre so I abhor OTA buying (I sideload all my B&N purchases).