[DawnFalcon]

Originally Posted by frabjous

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.

Well yes, but it's important. You have to match the features of the program you're making with TeX file with with the ones avaliable in the DVI driver. This isn't allways easy or obvious. With ePuB being a standard, you know what features you can drop back onto, with TeX this would be a real issue and incompatability would not only be possible, it'd be highly likely between different vendor's e-readers.

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.

It's necessary to understand it, and a bunch of other commands, for debugging the output. HTML and ePuB's XHTML are close in scripting language terms, TeX is different. This isn't trivial.

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?

In legal terms, "think" is meaningless. The issue to be considered is risk. Use under a CC liscence is a valid liscence, but when there's an attempt to put conditions on something supposedly in the public domain, it can and has been argued that it is not only not public domain, but that no liscence exists.

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...

But you're going to have to add another DRM system in to handle TeX, further fragmenting the market. How is that helpful?

And you say Tex "could" be expanded. Well, again, ePuB is having these things dicusssed now. Getting ebooks into doing the things that only they can do is a far better way of pushing their adoption, as a standard, and speeding up work on the rendering engine, than doing the things print books can do and being as marginalised as they are now before slowly bringing in vendor-specific ways of doing ebook-only things.

And yes, you /do/ want tags for dictionary referencing (there are multiple leanings for some words, you know, and it's useful to indicate which applies, for instance!). Then, as I said, there are things like embedded bookmarks (ones set in the book, not user-defined ones), popup text and so on...these can and should be in the book format, if they're to be adopted. They are clear areas where TeX is tied to print books and does not take into account the medium.