[frabjous]

Originally Posted by DawnFalcon

No, someone who is familiar with XHTML is not necessarily immediately going to know the details of creating a TeX book*. Not to a professional standard. There are training costs, and there are the delays this causes. And then you have to remember that this is only for a limited subset of ebooks, and the question of value immediately arrises.

I taught myself enough TeX to be able to produce a professional looking book in an afternoon.

I didn't understand what you were saying about DVI drivers. It doesn't matter if it's producing DVI or PDF or PS or whatnot to me.

(How is knowing XHTML going to tell you what, for example, /badness does?)

You don't need to know anything about badness in order to be a TeX user... any more than you need to know advanced PHP, ASP or JavaScript to write a basic HTML document. If you want to do more advanced stuff with it, like creating new style sheets, etc., it helps, and it has the power for that stuff, but it's not relevant.

Sure, TeX has the tags for footers and such. Where are the tags for dictionary referencing (and not), for dynamic content, for pop-up text, for moving to a pre-set bookmark?

You don't need tags for dictionary referencing. All works would be dictionary-reference-able: that's a feature of the display software, not TeX. The same goes for bookmarks. Actually with thing like beamer, you can already do pop-up text and some dynamic content with it. And if not, it's easily expandable.

All these things have been discussed as possibles for ePuB, and I don't see them being discussed for TeX. You want to freeze ebooks into having the same content as a printed book, which I simply don't.

If ePub can be expanded to do it, so can a similar format using TeX rather than HTML for its core rendering. Why would you think otherwise?

TeX is not a standard, and if you don't understand the legal problems (you cannot have conditional "public domain". There has to be a proper liscence, and there isn't!), then I'm sorry, but they do exist and they will cause problems. Intentions count for nothing, what matters are the actual legal practicalities.

First of all, there are licenses, such as some of the Creative Commons licenses, which are for all intents and purposes conditional public domain. It may be that Knuth would have to make the legal issues clearer, but there's nothing preventing him from doing so, and I can't imagine any roadblocks here. What, specifically, do you see as a legal hurdle here? You speak vaguely. Who is going to be suing whom? Do you honestly think Knuth is going to file a lawsuit with Amazon or Sony if they put TeX software on their readers and charge for the hardware?

Your motive? To freeze ebooks into pbook's feature set, if you're aware of it or not. That's what being limited to a general TeX renderer* means.

I don't mind the reader having other renderers. But you really think that using a TeX renderer to render the text has anything to do with the other features a reader may or may not have? Why would it?

Edit: Oh, and don't forget that in the short term you have to deal with DRM. I don't believe TeX supports DRM natively, so it would need another custom DRM format layered on top of it...

HTML doesn't support DRM natively either. They add the DRM to the ePub archive that contains HTML source. Presumably they'd do the same for some kind of archive that has encrypted TeX source underneath it. This does make my skin crawl, as I've already explained, but DRM does that...