Quote:
Originally Posted by Sarmat89
That's blatantly false.
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Oh,
dear. You wound me, sir, by maligning my friend Toxaris unjustly. To quote Lord Peter Wimsey, in, I believe, "
Have His Carcase,"
you drive me to the vulgarity of reminding you who I am.
I'm not, by any means, the most expert bookmaker on this forum. Far from it. Nor am I a programmer. I bow and defer to the wonks and geeks here, whose work amazes me. I'm not even the most successful person,
by far. I am, however,
pretty much the only one here that runs a conversion business full-time. Other people here do, of course, create eBooks professionally,
but the point I'm about to make is about numbers.
My company has, in the last seven years, formatted and converted
more than 3,000 books. I believe that gives me
some standing to address that statement.
And I can tell you
in absolutely no uncertain terms that publishers do not give two craps about metadata. For
every book we've done, since about mid-2009, I've handed out our metadata sheet, to be completed by the Publisher and returned to us for inclusion in their books.
Now, ask me
exactly how many have come back finished? How many have come back, at all? How many have come back with naught more than "title, name, and year of copyright" completed?
The answers to those questions are--about 20%; about 30%; nearly 70% never return the metadata sheet at all, and of the 30% that are returned to us for inclusion, most are simply the title, name of the author, and year of copyright. Period.
Quote:
If EPUB mandates the use of DC vocabulary in plain text form, it is problem of EPUB. There are simply no alternatives to it.
Because they cannot rely on EPUB metadata. With clearly defined scheme, that support will be trivial.
"John Smith", "Arthur Conan Doyle", "Johannes van der Waals" and "Murakami Haruki" all parse in different way, and there is no way for library software to do that automatically without errors.
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And how, exactly, would you control this? How would you use a "dropdown" or SAAS, or whatever you have in mind, that would prevent someone from listing an author incorrectly? Or would not allow them to skip the meta? And
if you had such a rigid system, how many self-pubs do you think would use it? Want me to tell you?
You need to hang out at some other fora, where self-pubs hang out. That "95%" that you think you're talking about, in your post about our workout book. (P.S.: you're wrong about that, too, but...<shrug>). Go to the KDP forums for self-publishers, and hang out wherever those Smashwords publishers hang out. See what those folks say about formatting their books. The same people that find uploading a Word file to Amazon, or Smashwords, "too hard."
That's the
bulk of self-publishers. You err, sir,
in assuming that all self-pubs can manage what you're describing, or can afford to have a company like mine format their books. Many using systems like "Draft2Digital" to clean their HTML, instead of doing it themselves.
If these folks can't manage to upload a clean Word file to Smashwords, how on EARTH do you expect them to use the system you're proposing?
And, again: how will you stop people from doing things like typing "xxxxxxx" for any of the text-based metadata? Author name? First name? Description? Year of Copyright, for that matter? I'm an old database girl, and I know firsthand that
there's only so much error-trapping you can do when it comes to text. That has nothing to do with whether we're discussing XML, XHTML, or Bob's Big Book Format.
Nothing you're discussing will make things like, "all covers designed by Fred Smith" viable for you to search upon, because, as Toxaris correctly pointed out,
publishers don't care. And frankly, by and large (at my guess, 95+%),
neither do most readers. The metadata that they
are interested in
is what's already available via the Amazon, Nook, iBooks, webpages. They have precisely
zero interest in whether or not the metadata about the minutiae is correct, inside the book.
Oh, well. I suppose that suffering through this thread is better than attending to my annual agony of getting our Holiday Greeting card done. Zounds, procrastination writ large.
Hitch