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Originally Posted by davidfor
Which to choose really comes down to personal opinion. And whether people can be bothered installing the software to change books to kepubs. There are differences in the font handling and epub does win out there. For example, the Adobe RMSDK will use ligatures, whereas the kepub renderer won't. And for an ugly error in a kepub, just look for a em-dash in a justified book. Some people think these things are important. Some don't care.
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You're describing the entire problem. We get to make one epub, and because each renderer is precious in its own special way, there's not going to be one epub that works perfectly in all renderers. Concessions are going to be made, just like they were for websites in the IE6 days when each web browser did things differently. One of those concessions is deeming software as out-of-date and not supported if it cannot read files in a 9-year-old standard.
Quote:
Originally Posted by davidfor
And the fact that these are not compatible with these older devices means that you are alienating a group of people that might need these books. There are still plenty of people using these old devices.
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The fact that old devices no longer receive firmware updates, and that this forum is, in 2020, recommending closed-source abandonware from 2012 as the default ereading program, is the core problem. Perhaps instead of sneering at the volunteers bringing free ebooks, we should sneer at the device makers who force closed source software on us that locks us into a crappy ereading experience for literally a decade. Consumers should perhaps think twice before buying a device they have no control over. And perhaps this forum should consider recommending a newer open-source alternative, instead of a ancient abandonware that due to its closed-source nature can never be upgraded. I can't wait to return to this forum in 2030 to hear how ADE 2.0.1 is still the ereading champion and how literally everyone and their mother is still using it, and by the way we recommend AOL Instant Messenger as the best chat program.
Quote:
Originally Posted by davidfor
Whether you make this change or not is up to you. But, at the moment, your claim of "Compatible epub" is not particularly valid.
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Clearly we disagree on this front. Fortunately we have statistics on our side; this has never come up in the ~6 years SE has been around and the many millions of ebook downloads in that time.
Quote:
Originally Posted by davidfor
From my experience, the differences in rendering between the different renderers are rarely significant.
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This is simply not true and anyone working on ebooks in the past decade will tell you that each renderer has its own rendering quirks and problems. They might not be as obvious if you're working on a plain prose novel with literally no formatting, but those are not as common as you seem to suggest. As Robin stated 40% of our corpus has endnotes, for example; and it's not like new books don't have their own unique formatting requirements. Again, developing ebooks today is like developing for the web during IE6. You get to distribute one file, to a bunch of different renderers with different ideas of how to render.
In any case, I think I'm done here. We seem to fundamentally disagree on the definition of what compatibility means, and that's fine. Our definition does not include your favorite ereader; but that does not make it untrue, because the favorite ereader of this forum is abandonware and would be considered unsupported by any reasonable technical body. The only
truly compatible format is plain text, after all.
I'll once again extend my invitation to any of you to join our volunteers and fix any problems you see yourselves:
https://github.com/standardebooks/tools As with all volunteer-based projects, lecturing their contributors is rarely the way to enact the change one wants to see. The best way to prove one's technical chops is with real contributions.