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Originally Posted by LDBoblo
What irks me about a lot of Gutenberg stuff is that many of my favorite books are in unformatted text files. I won't use their layout formatting, but it'd be nice to retain italics and perhaps some of the bolds.
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Well I think we need to keep in mind that PG has been running for over 35 years. And part of its goal is to make sure works are available in a format that literally can be read on any computerized device (Even if the resulting text might look very ugly).
I hope you do recognize that many of the works now come in alternate formats including html and epub... at least some of these have more advanced formatting present in them.
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One thing that has bothered me is that I've been reading a bunch of books where one or more characters speaks in caps. Properly reformatting it all to smallcaps is such a nasty burden.
I guess I too am yearning for some kind of resource for quality e-literature. Then again, after reformatting Pride and Prejudice several times for my reader, I just went and bought a lovely paperback at the bookstore instead. The digital version just feels diminished in some way...though I'm not precisely sure how, beyond simple tangibility. Could be typographic constraints, but I'm not sure that's it. Perhaps it's just hard to take them seriously since nobody else seems to (look at how some of these classics are bundled up badly and regurgitated as book deals to promote products and services).
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Well, there is a certain something about a paper book... its really hard to quantify, but its there... so I imagine there will always be a market for paper books, just like vinyl records have not completely faded away in the music business.
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Bill