[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by Jellby

So I expect some people may still buy the book, even if it might be available from free somewhere else.

Well at the company I work for, we give all of the books away for free on the site as PDF/EPUB. We also sell Kindle versions on Amazon, plus ebook versions in the store.

We mostly deal with Public Domain books, but we also try to release our new titles as close to the Public Domain as possible (Creative Commons 3.0).

Selling a non-scarce good (such as an idea/book) is not just selling the text itself... it is selling a bundle of goods:

• People will pay for convenience
  • Think method of delivery, Amazon makes it easy as pie to purchase a book
• Quality
  • I believe the public domain works that I convert are higher quality than the equivalent anywhere else.
• Reputation
  • You can be sure you won't get a virus from Amazon... unlike a potentially shady pirate site
• You are used to a certain ecosystem
  • For example, syncing your books between Amazon devices/readers.
• Perhaps the digital book can be tied as an extremely cheap addon to a physical version of the book
  • Think the new Kindle Matchbook program
• A digital book cannot be signed by an author.
• Yes, many people do not even "know better"
  • Knowing that there is high quality versions of the books on MobileRead)... and will pay for things they can otherwise get for free.
• Perhaps the way the public domain works are packaged is unique
  • For example, at work we focus on economics books... we can look through a lot of the public domain works and package ones are relevant to the interests of our users. They might pay for the "curating" service.

So the book/ideas themselves are free, but people are willing to pay for some of the above (of course there is a much larger list of ways to bundle non-scarce goods, I just listed a few).

Originally Posted by Psymon

Well, so much for my "brilliant idea" -- one of these days I'll come up with something new that never occurred to anyone else here.

I hope.

LOL... this is pretty much impossible. All ideas are built upon previous ideas... and you think you have come up with something unique, and you do a Google search on it, and you see tens/hundreds/thousands of others have already been using it for years. :P

Originally Posted by Hitch

Oh, hell no, man. K8 purportedly supports font-variant:smallcaps, but of course, as we discussed previously in this thread, the font has to have the smallcap variant for it to work. (Again, purportedly).

I just happened to settle on this clean CSS:

.smallcaps {
	font-weight: bold;
	font-variant: small-caps;
}

Sample code:

 <p class="noindent"><span class="smallcaps">International problems</span>, economic as well as political, arise out of the peculiar structure of our planet which, physically a single and indivisible unit, is divided politically into a number of separate states. Politically each of these states seeks independence and is jealous of its “sovereignty”; but owing to the uneven distribution of resources on the earth’s surface—and underneath it—the various states are united by links of economic interdependence. The quest for better living conditions has driven men, since time immemorial, to travel, exploration, migration, and trade. In addition, man, like the elephant’s child from Kipling’s tale, is “full of ’satiable curiosity.” To satisfy his insatiable curiosity he has set out upon a career of travel, visiting hitherto unknown regions and meeting new and strange people. Hunger and curiosity are the two powerful driving forces which made man, early in history, surrender the cosiness of his immediate surroundings for the sake of exploring the wide spaces of the world in which he might find adventure, wealth, and knowledge. Opportunities for intercourse between men belonging to different groups, tribes, city-states, and states grew steadily. Trade and war were the outcome of these inter-group and inter-state relations. And whereas we are more than ever anxious to eradicate from the surface of the world the scourge of war, we are very eager to develop and promote the peaceful relations between the peoples of the world. Among these none is more frequent and more important than trade.</p>

If the device supports font-variant: smallcaps, fantastic! (This would be on PC, Mantano (last I checked))... if not, it will just be bold text. Here it is in the PDF/Sigil/my Nook:



I think that simple code is much more maintainable in the long-run, than a tangle of hideous spans. Future formats/devices/reading programs will be able to handle font-variant, and I think the bold+smallcaps code degrades gracefully.