[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

Because they got started with stoneage rendering tools when those were the most modern and efficient ones available, and they work tolerably well (at least as far as "produce ebooks that the general public is willing to pay for"); they have no incentive to follow the cutting edge of the industry and re-tool their production process with new software every six months.

Not to mention, when they do re-tool, and revamp, it makes a boatload more work for the bookmakers, who then have to change direction, yet again. There's absolutely nothing to be gained by always being "cutting edge" on eBook production, I have to say it. We try to do it, and I'm always getting metaphysical paper cuts. For example (I use this one a lot), when Nook decided "hyphenation is good," and wreaked havoc with headers. Or when iBooks decided that centering was BAD, and you had to span everything to get it to center (just FYI, for those of you who think all spans are "bad"). Or when Kindle upgraded its KDP 3 weeks ago, and wreaked havoc with some subset of fonts yet to be defined.

I mean, as Elfwreck says, what the hell is to be gained, in telling a story, by deciding whether markdown or html or XML or the Big Blue Weenie markup language works best behind the scenes?

Standardization would meant total market dominance by whoever creates the standard. All manufacturers--of ebooks and devices--are invested in that creator *not* being their competitor. That means deliberately not doing things the way the competitors do it, regardless of how well that works.

Yes. This = Apple.

If one method had a sharp, noticeable, commercial advantage over the others, it would catch on. (See: dominance of epub; decline of LIT and LRF.) However, the general public does not care whether chapter headers are "properly" formatted H1, or <span> sections with specific formatting details. They care that chapter headers start on a new page and are bold. (Sometimes. Sometimes they don't even care about that.)

"Clean" ebook files are for formatting fanatics; readers, especially paying readers, aren't seeing the code. Readers care about whether the book "looks nice," but that's a subjective standard; there's no universal agreement on the best basic look. (I prefer indented paragraphs with no space between. Many readers prefer flush-left with spaces between. I like slab serifs; some people like serifs; some prefer sans. And so on.)

There is no universal method because there is no way that works "best," especially with many specific requirements in play for niche markets that don't matter for the larger crowd. And there's no cooperation to create a universal system, because the major developers are competitors.

Exactly. I honestly don't get this discussion, the more I think about it. I could almost understand a discussion, in print books, if printers started using newsprint, so that your hands were filthy after ten pages...or using such thin paper that pages tore when you turned them...but this is storytelling, or conveying useful information. They're BOOKS. They're not intended to be technological miracles, or cutting-edge. I really and truly don't understand why, ibu, you give two tosses about how the underlying bookmaker made the books. If you care that much, take it, crack it open and re-code it. {shrug}. It seems really...I don't know. I cannot imagine this sort of discussion 15 years ago about a print book ("OMG! Random House used an archaic printing machine, found only in the deep jungles of the Phillipines, to print this book! We have to change that, because it's wrong!"), and I genuinely don't understand the issue here.

I think I'm going with Diap's interpretation here...there's obviously some deep philosophical discussion going on that I'm simply too shallow to understand.

It's a BOOK.

Hitch