Quote:
Originally Posted by Hitch
Sez you. 
Yes, which YOU know because you're trying to make an eBook. Would you like to make a WAG (wild ass guess) at how many "Kindle" customers have the remotest idea that an eBook is HTML? I mean, come on, I get to answer this and discuss it with prospective clients--authors, mind you, who buy Kindle and Nook books like they are popcorn--nearly daily. Out of nearly 4K regular, retail customers? (By which I mean your typical author/self-publisher, not commercial pros.) |
Etc.
I see in these kinds of arguments of yours a striking similarity with the inclination of developers to conflate goals, design, and implementation.
I don't care what Kindle customers know or don't know about HTML -- or XML or Javascript, or Unicode , or any number of other technical areas. That's all irrelevant from the design perspective and goal of producing a readable book (given constraints on what CAN be done at the implementation level to achieve the goals and design criteria). Repeating claims about the technical knowledge or ignorance of the customer group is totally irrelevant to considerations of how they will/do/might interact with the finished product in which none of that is visible. Surely you must see this.
I don't dispute any of your claims or beliefs about the general technical understanding of Kindle readers -- in part because I don't doubt them, but in part because this doesn't matter to what this discussion is really about. If you want to use it as an opportunity to warn potential customers off from asking for certain features, then to me that's perfectly okay and I won't dispute that either.
But by your own argument, that level of ignorance strongly suggests that the very people you worry about aren't reading this thread, or this forum -- and so neither you nor they will be endangered by it. However, by the same token, you MUST recognize that a failure to understand what "sideload" means doesn't disqualify a potential customer from asking about a variety of features (at the purely perceptual or functional level) in the final product that may or may not be achievable or advisable. And of course you have to be prepared to answer those questions. And I do understand that you have a strong interest in protecting yourself against what you regard as unreasonable requests from customers and having to take time to explain to them why the request is unreasonable. Of course you have such an obligation. That's the nature of a service business. No one is disputing that.
But that's all completely irrelevant to the questions of feasible design and feasible implementation raised in this thread. If you see those questions or the possibility of those designs and implementations -- or even the discussions of them -- as threatening to you or your potential customers and your business, then you absolutely should point that out. But veering off into irrelevancies of how technically knowledgeable those customers are about a plethora of issues in the process of publishing doesn't further that goal. Now those very customers, if they in fact were to read such threads as this, would see mostly a lot of complaining about their ignorance. I guess that's one approach to warning them.
In short, you're not really disputing what's been discussed concerning those design and implementation issues. And suggesting that such discussions are in some way out of place, inappropriate, irresponsible, or dangerous
in a forum that's devoted specifically to technical aspects of E-Book Formats and ePub seems at best quite odd -- though you're certainly free to do it.