Quote:
Originally Posted by kovidgoyal
I totally agree that from the perspective of doing automatic conversions having a strict source format is a great thing (not strictly necessary, but great). The problem is that the perspective of doing automatic conversion is not the only one, nor even the most important one.
The most important perspective is to grow the adoption of ebooks. And to do that you have to encourage content producers as well as consumers. Content producers in general like flexibilty, they like a format that lets them do what they want to do instead of telling them that they can do only a very limited subset of things. So there's a tradeoff between making life easy for automatic converters and giving content producers what they want
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But wouldn't the adoption of eBooks be expediated if the books actually looked bloody nice? Let's face it, the core PG format, being of Plain Vanilla ASCII, does not give nice looking books. Readable yes, nice...not a chance.
Please note, the content of my post was about Project Gutenberg, not the publishing industry.