[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by frabjous

The Stop. You are depressing me. You're probably right, but at least now while the technology is new, a disproportionate number of technophiles are using ebooks; all the more reasons we put the pressure on now.

Technophiles are indeed using ebooks.

The publishing industry does not particularly cater to technophiles. In fact, it's pretty solidly entrenched in providing content to technophobes. And right now, the ebook industry is dominated by print publishers, who have no idea how to deal with ebooks, so they stick to print-ready PDFs as an attempt to convince everyone that an ebook is very much like a printed book--see, same fonts, same pages, same cover art; it just shows up on your screen.

They shy away from utilizing the features that ebooks offer that don't exist in pbooks. They don't tag. They don't bookmark. They're sloppy with metadata--either they have a program that manages that, or they ignore it entirely. They certainly don't provide an extra page at the end with links to the publisher's/author's website and more books.

You're depressing me again... But I don't think it's quite that bad. I imagine most people who have a reader will know about the zoom function; and if ebook sellers sold different sizes, they'd have to have them clearly marked.

Of course, those who have readers know about the zoom function. It's those that don't have them, who hear about those ebook things, and decide to try one out on their computer, who are the problem.

They download one, after twenty minutes of bizarre software installation and info-gathering, and they read it, and it looks odd. Then they hear you can put ebooks on your Blackberry, so they try that... but the ebook they bought doesn't work because the B'berry doesn't read .lit files. But they're diligent, so they look for another ebook that does work on their phone, and after another half-hour of weird software hassles, they have installed BeamReader and opened one of their sales proposals...

And decide very quickly that ebooks are not their thing, because the type is too small and the zoom is too much hassle, and how does anyone read this stuff? Wow, those technogeeks must really like reading on a little screen. Good for them; I'll stick to paperbacks.

I work in litigation support--scanning, printing & copying documents for law firms. (I'd say "for lawyers," but I never deal with lawyers; I deal with people two or three steps down from them.)
Some of the Q&A I've dealt with:

ME: Do you want that in TIFF or PDF format?
A: Ummm... I don't know what that is. Let me check with [person]; I'll have to get back to you about that.

ME: How do you want these files named?
A: Oh, don't name them anything. Just scan them onto the CD.

ME: What format do you want these in?
A: I want searchable tiffs.
ME: There are no searchable tiffs. There are tiffs with OCR text, either in a database load file, or separate text file; which would you...
A: No, I want searchable tiffs, just like I got from [rival company] last time.

Publishers will not go broke by underestimating people's interest in the technical aspects of ebooks.

(I think I like the idea of a TeX rendering ebook reader, but agree with the people who think it's too complex and potentially too much of a resource drain to be practical. One could be created; it's not going to overtake the current ebook formats. Especially not without a do-it-yourself converter program.)