The difference between my position and yours is fundamental.
I use "yours" because at this point it is obvious that I am faced with general opposition in here - and even If I try to get the conversation to the level of a debate - you guys wont bite, at this point, you want to heckle instead.
You are past the point where you attack personality, you now find "community" in disregarding an opinion that for me seems so blatantly obvious and rational to hold, somehow no one really tried to argue against it.
I criticized you guys for letting things slip on your guard and your immediate reaction was to discredit my voice. You even found an element of fun in not caring about social implications - entirely baffling to me, but hey - its your part of the community, right?
I am sorry, but I usually don't bow to displays of power when I see the people within those structures making mistakes. Which makes me a terrible preacher by the way, because religion is all about preserving structure.
But you din't exactly paint me as a that - you chose to classify me as an outcast, as someone that doesnt believe in your "technopositivist" notion, if certain ramifications aren't met. Some of them touch on the societal, on what are necessary properties of books, and on the notion that "tinkering" isn't worth much, when your output in the end mostly concerns giving better screensavers (cat pictures mostly) to people - on a device whose core functions you arent allowed to understand anymore.
Sure, you have filesystem access and can run minesweeper from a command line for whatever that's worth - but you arent allowed to look into anything that has to do with how the Kindle displays books. You can provide alternative reader programs, but the point of contention is, that people usually wont use it - as long as Amazon still allows other formats - even if some of them we don't understand anymore.
In your reality this isn't important. Here - use .kfx for all we care, someone hacked a way to let it be generated by a Amazon previewer software that also is a black box to us.
In my reality it is.
To be fair - you also provide a fallback - except that those three dozen people that are willing to switch to an alternative reader software don't show up in the broader picture at all.
I might sound like a broken record at this point, but I am still stuck at that moment in time when .kfx was released, eReading blogs celebrated it for finally becoming "more bookerly" - what ever that meant, and the general notion in here was that it was great, because you had something new to tinker with - except that you didn't --
- and when you found out, that reversing it wasn't possible at this stage (because Amazon, for the first time ever hadn't released a creation tool) you instantly went to ignoring the format mostly - because you had others that worked.
When you buy a book on Amazon you pull the hooks and leavers necessary to get an old file format - because thats just what we do. As people that still want the Calibre ecosystem to work.
It's not what the majority of people outside this bubble are doing. There is a new default, there is a new file format being autodelivered all over the world - and you chose to ignore it. Not comment on it, not to take a public stance against it.
The only thing remotely "rebellious" that came out of this community was when Calibre made a statement in not supporting .kfx, but only listing it - so you could find, see and delete it. Those are the only options any software that isn't closed down, Amazon created and in practically all cases part of their hardware (Kindle), can do with it.
And to tell you an open secret, that was about the only thing Calibre can provide until this day - but again you mostly didn't care.
My only interpretation of how a future in this ecosystem might look like was, that in 6-18 months most files, on the Readers (Kindles) of most people, will effectively be junk, as far as this community is concerned with - and that this would have "social implications", because we are still talking about books. Electronic books, but books non the less.
Thats the entire "fire and brimstone" part of my speech. It always was.
The notion I couldn't bare is, that Amazon was able to transition you into this without you forming a public opionion about it. Without telling your peers what it meant. Without bloggers taking a stand and publishing one "wait a minute..." article about it.
That strenghtened my believe, that things you see as something you cant fix, you'd rather not touch at all, than to acknowledge how little you can do about it - because while you are A class coders, you have no idea about fostering or maintaining a social opposition to the concept of the "book as a brandable item" (no, no - its an Amazon book, you know - the new format, with all those features...) nor did you want to learn how to do it.
Thats whats called an ivory tower, because while in your world - everything is fine, in mine we are just a few months away from .kfx becoming the defacto Kindle standard, while you still haven't made up your mind how to confront this.
At this point I guess we part ways.
Please try to remind me as a free thinker, and not so much as a preacher. Going back through all those pages, reading both positions - you owe me that much... Also I couldn't stand the label..
(edit: As a reaction to the Noah Feldman presentation - first *who's still watching TED..* (I don't like the format
), second - he's not wrong, you could conceptualize it that way, but it is also necessary to have a notion as to "why" they are deployed (so to speak).
If you are just concerned with there being a "working path" you loose all perspective as to if it is usable, or used at all. So I guess it depends on your understanding of what "technology" is.
(From my POV: Its just a means to an end, as well - more often than not..
("There's an App for that.") )