[Worldwalker]

Originally Posted by Solitaire1

The markup could be similar to HTML, but intended to be read by a human, rather than interpreted by a computer.

Um, might I point out that HTML is, in fact, meant to be read by a human? Or that the Web existed long before FrontPage, let alone Dreamweaver? There are still plenty of us hand-coding HTML, and a whole lot more of us squinting at lousy auto-created code to fix it.

Is reading <b> or <strong> really that much harder than reading [boldface starts here]?

A human takes the source text file and formats it in accordance with the instructions for a specific ebook format.

And thereby inserts errors.

You're talking about having a human act as a dumb processing system -- something which a computer can do much more efficiently. Having a human go along looking for [boldface starts here] and doing something with it isn't nearly as efficient as having a computer do the same, in terms of either accuracy or time.

On the other hand, you've provided a perfect example right here:

I think that ebooks are in the same statues as CDs and digital audio recording were in the early days.

You wrote "statues" where you meant "status". Since we can assume that you know the difference between sculptures and condition, it probably happened because your fingers, running half on automatic as you thought a line ahead of where you were actually typing, inserted that extra 'e' and, since it made a legitimate word, no little red line appeared under it on your screen. That's the part that we need humans for. To a computer, since pearls can be in statues (The Adventure of the Six Napoleons), and since tourists can be in statues (the Statue of Liberty), why can't CDs and ebooks be in statues? That's where we need a human who can understand what it was you were trying to say, as distinct from what you actually wrote, and spot the typo.

And that's what the problem is with the ebooks: not that computers can't read the formatting, or that a human could read it better, but that computers can't spot when something has gone wrong. They can read the formatting just fine; they can't understand the content. That's particularly true of OCR'd text, but it also comes up with things like soft hyphens, hard returns, and other things meant to format text ... for humans.

Due to the differences between analog and digital recording, it took the recording industry time to adjust to the change and I think that it will be the same with ebooks.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't the recording industry using digital recording for masters long before digital formats became available on a consumer level? I don't think there was that big an adjustment.