[Peter Sorotokin]

Originally Posted by silkpag

That in the days prior to 9/11, federal agents, rather than answer calls about, you know, 19 dudes in Florida who were learning how to fly planes but not land them, instead at the behest of one corporation that made shoddy software, attended a hacker convention, arresting the guy that proved it?

I guess there is no way for me to argue with this kind of reasoning...

Not that Adobe doesn't love the little guy, but, of course, your own vice president is on record trashing the achievements of self-publishers.

http://blogs.adobe.com/billmccoy/200...ublishing.html

The post says basically that if you want to sell several thousands copies you still need to get a publisher involved. How that is trashing?

That Astroturfing might be a fear of mine, but then, a former IDPF head, now with Adobe, was just caught lying to a semi-influential mailing list about Amazon's Epub support (Mobizon supports OEBPS 2.0 as a conversion source, like everyone else, and in fact Mobi was the first major ebook software company to do so.):
http://toc.oreilly.com/2008/04/keep-...play-nice.html

Of course, Nick was talking about native EPUB support with no conversion to a vendor-specific format. You need that if you want to move the same book between, say, a cell phone, PC and dedicated eBook reader device.

But that's OK, as despite the fact that, you know, in the age of $5 1 GB SD cards, Adobe's software chokes on a couple hundred K of text.

Not that amount of storage in the card helps with a lack of RAM and CPU cycles...

we're told that it's "best practices" to chop every book up (even classics like Moll Flanders or Tropic of Cancer that don't have chapter breaks):
http://blogs.adobe.com/digitaleditio...igital_ed.html

Remember the goal is to make it work well on hand-helds. Yes, with more coding it is possible to handle very long chapters even on the devices and we'll get there eventually, but short runs will work better on all devices and all viewers.

The above site is perhaps my favorite little bit of deception, as of course this failing of Adobe's makes all other means of creating .epub files (the DAISY Pipeline, Mischa's OEB2Epub, whatever Bookglutton's running) untrustworthy... but of course that's the fault of the user, not Adobe.

Let's see. We try to use the standard format. There are limitations and gotchas that we have encountered and we spend time documenting and discussing those. Others use a format of their own and in many cases keep all the info to themselves. You are telling me that we are somehow evil and shutting others off?

Now, with your programmers so busy chatting up folks on blogs, there might be a few weaknesses in the software itself.

That's the most polite way to say "shut up" that I know. I guess I'll follow your advice.


Peter