[Hitch]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

What should ebook creators today do?
Obviously, they should learn how to prioritize things. Clearly they should be hanging out on an internet forum griping about how EPUB doesn't work, rather than waste their time making money (and satisfied customers) using an ethically wrong format.

Here, to my mind, are the biggest issues:

1. The truth is, 99.99% of all readers couldn't give two s**ts about whether or not a paragraph, a dedication, an acknowledgement, etc., are "tagged" as such. That's utterly irrelevant to them. They couldn't care less.
2. Amazon, B&N, Kobo and Apple all have self-publishing portals. There are other self-publishing portals (Smashwords, et al) being used around the world. All of these--ALL--basically work off of Word or, in Apple's case, Pages (via iAuthor). NONE of these word-process programs have remotely decent XML export capabilities.
3. Even if they did have decent XML export capabilities, here's the bigger problem: there's ZERO support out there for the MILLIONS of self-publishing authors, who are DIY'ing their books. At Amazon and B&N, they can take a correctly-styled Word file, upload it, and kablammo! Their book is made. This is done simply by using WORD's built-in styles capabilities.
4. If you use Word's built-in STYLES correctly, you can--no matter what any piker says--produce HTML that's perfectly viable for an eBook. I've done it, to prove a point.
5. There isn't ANY viable means to make XML-based eBooks that easy for the self-publisher, unless you create an even more restrictive browser-type "build your ebook here" program/app/system.
6. And while I know, factually, that two of those exist (for XHTML, mind you), DIYERs are not going to go for that. They simply will not. I can see it now: upload your XXX file. Highlight this, and indicate from our dropdown of 500 possible semantics, what this is: acknowledgement, dedication, epigraph.... Nah, NOT. For the love of GOD, you can't even get them to use bloody HEADING styles in their WP files!!!!! Or use a STYLE for ANYTHING. And you think that this will work? Force them to mark *every* single thing--every paragraph, etc., as this or that? Oh, please, somebody get me an emoty that has crocodile tears from laughing (or crying) too hard. They will NOT DO IT, period.
7. Neither Amazon, B&N, Apple nor Kobo are going to be willing to invest and create the sort of back-ends required, or to redo the massive back-end systems that they will need, to enable this type of DIY eBook in XML creation.
8. Lastly: and I realize that this holds no water with the OP--bookmakers, like me, are not going to be willing to do this. When I pull up DocBook's old specs--or 2014 specs, as some people are still out there flogging that horse--I can see at a glance that to semantically tag EVERY BLOODY ELEMENT in a book the way this guy wants will take me far more time than our current process. No argument. The idea that it will be faster or easier is just hogwash. I say that after seeing more than 3K books go through our company, so I think I have some standing to say it.
9. That means less profit for me. I'm already (as are ALL eBook-making companies, except the scammers) riding the hairy edge on profitability. I'm certainly NOT willing to do more work, for the same amount of money, to satisfy a problem that ONE person in the known World has. That's idiotic.

And lastly: other than allowing someone to sort on some maybe-included metadata--to use the first example again, "covers created by Person X," or "books published in 2014," or whatever, I have not seen any advantage listed for this not-yet-created-format. NONE. The OP persists in saying it's BETTER, but other than saying, "using semantically correct styling is BETTER," we've seen no proof whatsoever. Not a single benefit to me has been listed, other than a largely imaginary idea that somehow this would be faster. It won't be. Anyone who thinks it MIGHT be should look here: http://www.docbook.org/tdg5/en/html/ch02.html . And while the OP can say that his idea is NOT DocBook--it IS DocBook. Or, if not exactly DocBook, it's DocBooks' kissing cousin, for all intents and purposes.

To understand the reality of the entire situation, you have to ask yourself, "why did DocBook fail?" THAT is the question you have to ask yourself. By all accounts, somewhat like LaTEX, DocBook should have been taken up in large part. DocBook was, for bookmakers, what looked like an idea solution--you create one source file, and then, using the various XSLT's, you could create multiple output formats therefrom.

So: why didn't DocBook take off like a rocket?????? Hmmm. I wonder. Could it be that all the issues, I listed above, were part of the problem? It had wide OS community support; it's been kept up. There's no reason NOT to use DocBook, to this day. In fact, the OP should use it, as by and large, it will get him what he wants--fully tagged semantically-correct eBooks. Sure, he'll be stuck outputting them into ePUB or whatever--but the tagging will still be there. He says he's an ePUB maker, so this should be easy-peasy for him, and he'll get all the semantics he wants.

He claimed that there are eBook readers out there already that support XML output, so...I would imagine that it's not hard to tweak the files to create a pure XML eBook therefrom.

This way, HE can be happy, and WE can be happy.

The reality is, (gosh, I hate to bring THAT up in such a scintillating conversation) nobody is going to invest money or time or effort in another XML format, when the first one, the first large-scale one, DocBook, died like a flounder. That's the truth. This isn't a bikeshed; the whole conversation is just...ludicrous. This would only have legs if a) we convinced the IDPF it had legs, and b) more importantly, we convinced AMAZON, APPLE, etc., it had legs. Otherwise, we may as well be...well, I won't say what that is.