[Hitch]

Originally Posted by ecbritz

My original request was how a new forum for Product X could be started. I received clear and sympathetic answers. So this issue is really settled now.

Something important was said in a thread I started in the Sigil forum. The forum participant who is a professional eBook editor said that her craft and quality work is being threatened by the rise of self-help amateurs who use software products making it easier to produce eBooks. These "cockroaches" are pulling the art and the business of creating quality eBooks down. I hope I paraphrase the lady more or less correctly.

This remark suddenly put some of the agitation raging in that thread in perspective for me. The lady might have a point. Her complaint has quieted me down.

It has also made me feel that if I want to introduce Product X to other users, I must first go back to it and study it more closely. It's in that sense that I feel like trotting off into the sunset for the time being.

Firstly, what I said, precisely, was this:

Only an idiot would not know that commercial ebooking's days are numbered. None of us know how many days that is; we just know that it is true. There are at least five firms I know of that folded their tents this year alone.

And, with regard to "cockroaches," I was most certainly not talking about people who make tools/programs, either free or paid, for making ebooks. I have been known to recommend Jutoh, here on MR (as well as BC, BD, etc.) to certain types of DIY'ers. I was in specificity discussing the SCAMMERS who we see in here all the time, asking on the Sigil forum (and others) how to do "X" for a paying client, while at the same time asking what a "paragraph class" is, or how to do something simple, like center a paragraph, or put whitespace above a paragraph--indicating that they don't even know what CSS is, or what HTML does.

I consider those people, who are charging others for professional ebook conversion services, when they don't know what they are doing, to be scamming cockroaches. I was clearly replying to a post in which, again, you mis-characterized what I'd said, claiming I'd said that the "days of ebooks were numbered," which you may see is not what I'd said. (If anyone at all is interested in this, it's this thread: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=212088 in the Sigil Forum.) What I replied then is:

I meant simply that the days of ebook conversion houses are numbered. The huge publishers have all outsourced the work offshore, and don't even proof what they get back, particularly for backlist books (I know this factually, not anecdotally) and the "Kindle Gold rush" is patently over, as an unintended consequence of the KDP Select program. Existing authors that were making a living now aren't; would-be or hopeful authors read about this and have put off publishing.

And we all know that the lack of quality control in the industry, of any kind at all, means that more and more people will use tools like Calibre (nothing against it for its intended purpose) rather than either do the work properly or pay someone to do it properly, or worse, get taken advantage of by the rip-off artists we've seen come through here who don't even know how to extract the content or spell HTML, much less work in it. So...yes, I think quality companies like mine will indeed go out of business, whilst scammers, as always, will thrive. Just like cockroaches.

I believe that the distinction I made was quite clear. The comments I've made have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with you or your commercial program. Your choice to "withdraw" is clearly based on your own agenda, and has nothing whatsoever to do with me or anyone else on this forum, other than a) you couldn't get the folks on Sigil or ePUB forums to write a "how to create an ePUB" tutorial for you, which you rather persistently tried to obtain over the course of a few weeks, and b) you will not be able to obtain a free and quick and easy forum for your product, free or otherwise, without putting in months of work to get the product discussed, tried, talked-about, etc.

That choice is entirely yours. It is unrelated to any comments I made. I've freely and openly supported various "DIY" programs over the years; I am a heavy supporter of Sigil and an occasional supporter of Calibre; I recommend BC and BD for html clean-up, as well as ePUBfixer, ePUBtweak, Toxie's HTML clean-up macro, paid programs like Jutoh and Scrivener and numerous other programs, both paid and free. I don't conflate DIY'ers with my clientele, in general, at the moment. That I think that Word, etc., will all come to have "export to ePUB" functions in the near-ish future is hardly an Amazing Kreskin prognostication.

Hitch