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Originally Posted by taustin
Reverse engineering is documentation. Calibre can convert to it. It's not unknown.
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It *is* unknown with regard to the a-technical masses. Only getting a DRM-ed book onto an eReader can be hard enough for some.
- Some think that the ASCM-file is actually the book.
- Some don't know what to do with the book / eReader after they have the book in ADE.
- Some people run into DRM-problems, and both Adobe *and* the store won't help.
And if they get the book onto the reader, there will be problems when there's going to be another reader, or computer, or.... And I'm not even thinking about someone getting a Kindle because it looks nice, not knowing that it won't run EPUBS out of the box, because he thinks "an ebook is an ebook".
Even if you can convert from EPUB to Kindle AZW or the other way around, the output will never be perfect, and it's not guaranteed that you can use that output later on to convert to yet another format.
Quote:
Originally Posted by taustin
Failing to copy stuff over to new media as it comes out is not a technology problem, it's a user problem. And it cannot be solved by technology.
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After the devices needed to read the original media are gone, you're done for.
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I still have prgrams I wrote nearly 20 years ago, for DOS. And you know what? They still work, on my 64 bit Windows 7 machine. Yeah, I have to use an emulator, but there are multiple emulators available, mostly for free. There are versions of DOS still in active development.
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I know. I still run games from the nineties without problems, and many even without an emulator. Still I've also encountered formats from that period that are not readable by any current program, as the format was tied to one particular application.
Yes, you can run the application, in an emulator, IF you can find it. If you don't have the application: *poof*.
You're looking at all this as someone who knows technology. Most people buying ebooks don't know anything about technology, and the slightest problem will immediately stump them. That's not stupidity or ignorance per se. I don't don't drive a car, but if I did, the slightest engine problem that my sister could probably fix will bring me to a standstill, and I'm far from stupid. I just don't know anything about how cars work. And there are a lot of people who don't know how computers (or eBooks for that matter) work.
And even if they do, it is always possible that a solution that is available to you, may not be available to them, because of missing devices, or software or cost of the solution itself.