Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
I share your viewpoint, but those are us who are actively involved in creating books are probably outnumbered 1000 to 1 by those who simply read them. The typical reader doesn't give two hoots what source format a book is it - they're just interested in being able to download a nice version of it for their device.
Look at all the thousands and thousands of members this site has. How many people actively upload books here? That number is in single figures.
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Sure but I don't see your point: on Feedbooks there's as many registered users as Mobileread and we have hundreds of thousands of people downloading books each month.
My point is that it would be much better if you used a different workflow, that can easily evolve in the future. Let's take a simple example: when people first started uploading books in Mobipocket on MobileRead, most of these books were missing an author because of the way Book Designer handled this file format. If such a thing ever happened on Feedbooks, it would be super easy to fix: I would simply dump the cache, fix the output and every file would have correct metadata. On the other hand, with end format uploads on Mobileread, you would have to re-generate and re-upload every single Mobipocket file.
Relying on a source-format is much more flexible and future proof: I'm not saying that the readers care about the source format, but with a real source format it's much easier to support any new format, improve the formatting for every file available and provide a better overall experience.
Sure, uploaders on Mobileread are doing a great job proofreading/typesetting books, it's too bad though that instead of working with a real publishing workflow (where the structure of the book and semantic elements are important) you rely only on end formats.