It's always good to have new folks join the MR community.
Quote:
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Originally Posted by eyestrain
I think it is their responsibility though, if they are packaging the content in a format specifically for a device they manufacture, and then profiting from the sale of that content. It's passing the buck to say its the publishers responsibility, surely sony convert the source data into the sony reader format in much the same way we have to, isn't that the stage you have to make sure that the fonts are in line with the rest of your generated files? Or is it that the process is completely automated, with no possibility of intervention?
You are never going to get different suppliers to adhere to one format, in practice it just doesn't work that way.
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I don't know the details of the processing (wouldn't
that be nice?
) but I would
think it's pretty automated. They started with over 10k titles, and have added about 1k in the last 2.5 months -- that would be a really sucky job to do manually, and we're still talking about a relatively low volume of titles there.
<Wild Speculations>
I suspect it may even be a matter of perhaps having
access but not
authority. Keep in mind that whoever
owns the content has a lot of control over it, legally speaking. Then there's the fact that the pubs don't
have to let Sony sell their content, so that weakens Sony's position to go making demands or arbitrarily changing the content in any fashion (and I'm not
sure that the stupid DMCA might not come down against making even so trivial a change as the font size
). The pubs can just take their respective balls and go home if they want to.
Sure, the rights to make such adjustments
could have been written into the relevant agreements, but if they weren't (for whatever reason) then they weren't.
Keep in mind too, that the Pubs might actually be
opposed to changing the font size much, since it might disrupt all their work getting the layouts the way they wanted them.
</Wild Speculations>
I'm not trying to defend Sony's actions, understand -- I don't even know what they were! -- just trying to make sure we think about the fact that there are a lot of things going on here that might affect the outcome, and most of them are stuff we can only guess at.
On balance, I tend to regard these sorts of things as growing pains. Personally, I'm just glad to see the whole e-book thing actually showing some vestiges of mainstream motion, both on the hardware side, and in the realm of increasing e-book availability.
