Quote:
Originally Posted by DiapDealer
I liken it to someone asking a publisher/printer to arrange it so their physical book is weighted and balanced in such a way that it opens to a very specific page whenever a reader drops it spine-first on a table. 
There's no real point to it, IMO. You can't make people read stuff they don't want to (or skip stuff they don't want to), so open the ebook and let the reader find where they want to start. They're readers... they have a lot of experience doing just this. They don't need any help. And if Amazon (since this is mostly their fault to begin with for trying to automatically find the "very best beginning point") wants to change things so books open at or immediately following the html ToC, then make sure nothing you deem " too important for the reader to miss out on" comes before that html ToC and have done.
I understand pros (like Hitch and others) are compelled by paying customers to "make this work," (and have to try and do so--bless their souls) but that doesn't stop me from believing that their paying customers are making mountains out of mole hills. Just rearrange the book so Amazon's diddling can't accidentally cause a reader to "start" too far into the thing and move on.
The SRL is giant, soul-sucking waste of time (on both sides of the equation). It's like spending enormous amounts of time, money, and resources on creating an automated system to detect which way you need to tilt your boot to dump the water out of it. |
Well, personally I like the idea of it opening to the first page of text.
I don't see the harm in it, although I think Amazon should just stop interfering. It works just fine before they post-process it...
Look -- I will grant you that there are bigger things to worry about.