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posted by chromas on Sunday April 22 2018, @11:39PM   Printer-friendly
from the documents-definitely-need-javascript dept.

Daniel Glazman believes that EPUB has reached a technical dead end.

  • It is impossible to aggregate a set of web pages into a EPUB book through a trivial zip, and it is impossible to unzip an EPUB book and make it readable inside a Web browser even with graceful degradation.
  • Despite the International Digital Publishing Forum merging with W3C in January 2017, EPUB continues to diverge from web standards.
  • The EPUB 3.1 specification has been rescinded because it is too costly and complex for the eBook industry to adopt.

Mr. Glazman's solution? The WebBook format. From the announcement:

I have then decided to work on a different format for electronic books, called WebBook. A format strictly based on Web technologies and when I say "Web technologies", I mean the most basic ones: html, CSS, JavaScript, SVG and friends; the class of specifications all Web authors use and master on a daily basis. Not all details are decided or even ironed, the proposal is still a work in progress at this point, but I know where I want to go to.

[...] I have started from a list of requirements, something that was never done that way in the EPUB world:

  1. one URL is enough to retrieve a remote WebBook instance, there is no need to download every resource composing that instance
  2. the contents of a WebBook instance can be placed inside a Web site's directory and are directly readable by a Web browser using the URL for that directory
  3. the contents of a WebBook instance can be placed inside a local directory and are directly readable by a Web browser opening its index.html or index.xhtml topmost file
  4. each individual resource in a WebBook instance, on a Web site or on a local disk, is directly readable by a Web browser
  5. any html document can be used as content document inside a WebBook instance, without restriction
  6. any stylesheet, replaced resource (images, audio, video, etc.) or additional resource useable by a html document (JavaScript, manifests, etc.) can be used inside the navigation document or the content documents of a WebBook instance, without restriction
  7. the navigation document and the content documents inside a WebBook instance can be created and edited by any html editor
  8. the metadata, table of contents contained in the navigation document of a WebBook instance can be created and edited by any html editor
  9. the WebBook specification is backwards-compatible
  10. the WebBook specification is forwards-compatible, at the potential cost of graceful degradation of some content
  11. WebBook instances can be recognized without having to detect their MIME type
  12. it's possible to deliver electronic books in a form that is compatible with both WebBook and EPUB 3.0.1

Compatibility with EPUB 3.0.1 is a good way to start adoption. Now to see if WebBook catches on. The GitHub repository is here.


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  • (Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday April 22 2018, @11:45PM (7 children)

    by Ethanol-fueled (2792) on Sunday April 22 2018, @11:45PM (#670526) Homepage

    If EPUB sucks ass, then plebes like me won't trust that your later version won't also suck donkey balls. Prove your worth or eat a bag of donkey dicks.

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Apparition on Monday April 23 2018, @12:05AM (2 children)

      by Apparition (6835) on Monday April 23 2018, @12:05AM (#670536) Journal

      Why exactly is EPUB "shit?" The most common argument I've seen against EPUB is DRM, but that's not in the EPUB spec. There are plenty of EPUB files available without DRM.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @05:17AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @05:17AM (#670628)

        Why exactly is EPUB "shit?"

        Looking at who the OP is, I guess it's because it doesn't come with free alcohol. ;-)

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @02:21PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @02:21PM (#670743)

        Epub is pretty good, the main problem is that it's a pain to create them for people who don't do so professionally. In many cases it would make more sense to use an ebook formatted document as a manual rather than a PDF, but since creating epubs tends to be rather annoying, you usually get the PDF.

        And as stated in the summary, it's hard to create an epub from a web page.

    • (Score: 2, Insightful) by driverless on Monday April 23 2018, @06:05AM (3 children)

      by driverless (4770) on Monday April 23 2018, @06:05AM (#670633)
      • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Monday April 23 2018, @12:42PM (2 children)

        by Grishnakh (2831) on Monday April 23 2018, @12:42PM (#670708)

        You have to take that comic (927) with a grain of salt. The existence of standards doesn't mean you shouldn't try to improve; if the current standards are all total shit, then it's perfectly rational to invent a new standard that attempts to be better. I don't know enough about EPUB to say whether it's shit or not, but there's plenty of places where the dominant standards are garbage.

        • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday April 23 2018, @04:14PM (1 child)

          by maxwell demon (1608) on Monday April 23 2018, @04:14PM (#670786) Journal

          You have to take that comic (927) with a grain of salt.

          But is it a metric or an imperial grain? :-)

          --
          The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
          • (Score: 2) by Osamabobama on Monday April 23 2018, @08:43PM

            by Osamabobama (5842) on Monday April 23 2018, @08:43PM (#670879)

            Well, it's not metric.

            The grain is a unit of mass in the troy, avoirdupois, and apothecaries' systems of mass, but not metric or System International. Luckily, they are all the same.

            --
            Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by frojack on Sunday April 22 2018, @11:49PM (48 children)

    by frojack (1554) on Sunday April 22 2018, @11:49PM (#670529) Journal

    any html document can be used as content document inside a WebBook instance, without restriction .... each individual resource in a WebBook instance, on a Web site or on a local disk,

    And that's exactly why I don't want this steaming pile.

    --
    No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
    • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 22 2018, @11:58PM (9 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 22 2018, @11:58PM (#670532)

      ... you don't control your reading device (or, at least, your network access).

      • (Score: 4, Informative) by hendrikboom on Monday April 23 2018, @12:05AM (8 children)

        by hendrikboom (1125) Subscriber Badge on Monday April 23 2018, @12:05AM (#670535) Homepage Journal

        Most ereaders are beyond the owner's control. Their only saving grace is that they are too stupid to be easily suborned by the likes of javascript.

        Does anyone make e-ink tablets that *are* under the user's control? I'd love to use a suitable Linux on one.

        • (Score: 4, Informative) by archfeld on Monday April 23 2018, @12:50AM (5 children)

          by archfeld (4650) <treboreel@live.com> on Monday April 23 2018, @12:50AM (#670553) Journal

          My Kindle e-reader will load local resources and can be accessed as a storage device via the USB cable. I get books from private authors, as well as the internet archive, in addition to the publisher controlled kindle library.

          Sources such as Obooko https://www.obooko.com/ [obooko.com]
            or the Internet Archive https://openlibrary.org/ [openlibrary.org]
          Offer various format ebooks for download.

          --
          For the NSA : Explosives, guns, assassination, conspiracy, primers, detonators, initiators, main charge, nuclear charge
        • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @01:11AM (1 child)

          by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @01:11AM (#670559)

          http://www.onyx-international.com/ [onyx-international.com]

          • (Score: 3, Insightful) by hendrikboom on Monday April 23 2018, @03:20AM

            by hendrikboom (1125) Subscriber Badge on Monday April 23 2018, @03:20AM (#670592) Homepage Journal

            Interesting device. But I find it hard to get a clear idea from that advertising presentation just what I'd get if I were to buy one. Is it just a display and input device that happens to have some software inside it to read ebooks and talk to a computer via an HDMI cable? Or does it actually have some programmability?

            And isn't an e-ink display too slow for HDMI data rates? It makesme wonder what the HDMI connection is for other than to be able to say it does HDMI on the web site.

            It talks about being compatible with a lot off operating systems, but I suspect those systems won't actually run on it.

            And it has a quad-core processor. But what quad-core processor. That kind of makes a difference.

            And what's battery life when it's used for just reading books?

    • (Score: 5, Interesting) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday April 23 2018, @12:00AM (36 children)

      I wasn't hating on it too bad until I saw the word "javascript". After that it can eat a bag of dicks, as can EPUB 3+. Thankfully, Calibre can solve all of my problems there.

      --
      My rights don't end where your fear begins.
      • (Score: 2) by Apparition on Monday April 23 2018, @12:13AM (18 children)

        by Apparition (6835) on Monday April 23 2018, @12:13AM (#670537) Journal

        JavaScript being part of the WebBook spec is no surprise, since Daniel Glazman was a JavaScript programmer for Mozilla. If used sparingly, it shouldn't be a problem. The problem is that that is a big "if."

        • (Score: 5, Insightful) by RS3 on Monday April 23 2018, @12:33AM

          by RS3 (6367) on Monday April 23 2018, @12:33AM (#670544)

          I agree with you, but there are evildoers out there in many forms, so you can't expect everyone to play fair and write proper code. I've railed against javascript for 20 years, but the problem is not javascript. The problem is what the browser is willing to do, and what the OS allows access to.

        • (Score: 5, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday April 23 2018, @12:57AM (16 children)

          Nope, not even then. The only thing about a book that needs to be interactive or change in any way during runtime is which page you're reading. Which means every little bit of it can be done with plain old HTML. Not even HTML5; HTML3.2 would be sufficient for nearly every book ever published. I'll grant you CSS would make styling it less verbose but even that isn't strictly necessary.

          --
          My rights don't end where your fear begins.
          • (Score: 4, Interesting) by frojack on Monday April 23 2018, @03:52AM (7 children)

            by frojack (1554) on Monday April 23 2018, @03:52AM (#670597) Journal

            Which page you are reading, type face. and font size.

            Everything else will be use for advertising and spyware. Even if you suppose no internet connection during reading, there will be one there sooner or later.

            This whole issue here is capability beyond what is needed for an e-reader.
            They are thinking Newspaper replacement.

            I am thinking get out of my face.

            --
            No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
            • (Score: 2) by zocalo on Monday April 23 2018, @06:38AM (3 children)

              by zocalo (302) on Monday April 23 2018, @06:38AM (#670641)
              I can see how JavaScript might be useful for some forms of reference manuals - interactive physics models, mathematical function graphs, and so on - but we all know it's going to be abused to deliver ads and tracking as a way to justify selling books cheaper so they can make even more money back through either selling access to your data or just selling it wholesale. The only way I'd even be prepared to accept this in my ebooks would be if the standard made it mandatory that it had to be click to enable on a per-script basis and could have a blanket "Off" switch that could be overridden per book, which I doubt is going to happen because bigdata = money.

              Still, if this goes ahead as proposed, I suspect there is going to a good deal of interest in ebook converters that strip this kind of crap out and ebook readers that make it click to play, no matter what the standard says. A growing number of people have had enough of the all pervasive use of ads and tracking on the web and will go to quite considerable lengths to block it, if they're expecting that group to feel any differently about the same stuff in ebooks then I suspect they're going to be disappointed.
              --
              UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
              • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday April 23 2018, @10:24AM (2 children)

                Calibre can already convert from epub 3 to plain old text, or most any other non-interactive ebook format.

                --
                My rights don't end where your fear begins.
                • (Score: 2) by zocalo on Monday April 23 2018, @11:12AM (1 child)

                  by zocalo (302) on Monday April 23 2018, @11:12AM (#670679)
                  Yeah, I know - Calibre is my ebook tool of choice, although I use a more fully featured reader app than Calibre's embedded ones (Moon+ Reader Pro [google.com], FWIW). I have no doubt that both apps (and many others) would enable sufficient control over embedded JavaScript if it became necessary, e.g. global/selective script removal in Calibre and tap-to-play in Moon+ Reader, but other readers might not, and readers/publishers that intend to make some (or all) of their revenue from tracking data will almost certainly use it to help DRM content and track users as much as the official spec permits, and then some. A specification obviously isn't going to stop a bad actor from going against the accepted way of doing things, but it does at least provide a means for those that care to measure how trustworthy the vendor might be, and should hopefully also make it easier to get shady apps/books removed from stores.
                  --
                  UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
                  • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday April 23 2018, @11:21AM

                    Yup to calibre's built in reader. As far as I can tell, it's mostly there to make sure the conversion went off without a hitch. I don't read ebooks much on my desktop anyway though, so that's pretty much all I need it to do.

                    --
                    My rights don't end where your fear begins.
            • (Score: 2) by Arik on Monday April 23 2018, @11:45AM (1 child)

              by Arik (4543) on Monday April 23 2018, @11:45AM (#670692) Journal
              "type face. and font size."

              Should be set by the user, not the book.
              --
              If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
              • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @02:27PM

                by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @02:27PM (#670746)

                That's idiotic. Those should be set by the book with the reader being able to override it if need be.

                Depending upon the content of the book, the font size shouldn't always be the same, if you're looking for more of a light breezy read, then something like Times New Roman 10, is a great choice, but if you're reading something where you need to read slower or you need a larger font, you'd want something else. Then there's computer manuals where they often times use multiple fonts to differentiate between book content and what you actually type at the prompt.

                In short, the people making most of these books do spend time considering the needs of the readers when setting those defaults, if don't let them do it, then all sorts of weird things can happen. What's worse, is that you may not even be making the correct choices for an enjoyable read, but if it defaults to something from the publisher, you can easily go back and forth as appropriate.

            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @05:19PM

              by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @05:19PM (#670806)

              they just need to put the ability/requirement for a webbook to include details in it's file format in the spec. kind of like exif in images.

              'uses_js' -> '1',
              'has_remote_resources' => '1',

              you get the idea. then you could choose whether to use certain books based on their technical aspects.

          • (Score: 2) by JNCF on Monday April 23 2018, @05:11AM (5 children)

            by JNCF (4317) on Monday April 23 2018, @05:11AM (#670626) Journal

            Frojack points to some stylistic toggling the user might like to do without reloading the page, but it should all be doable -- if a bit clunky -- with some CSS selectors and radio buttons. There are some things that could be added to his list, most obviously annotations.

            As for what can't be done, I see an argument for built in note-taking in ebooks. I write in the margins of (some) dead tree books, why shouldn't I be able to do the same with an ebook? Yeah, I could keep these separate, but if and when I read the book again I'd like to be able to read the notes of my previous iteration and edit them as I go. Sometimes I have insights the first time that I don't have the second time until I read them again, and other times I just mark out my stupid ideas that were incorrect and addressed by the author later in the same work. I own at least two books with five different colors of ink in them, each corresponding to a different read-through. I'm usually hesitant to loan out books I've written in, since the notes are harder to replace than the books (and potentially embarrassing, when they're stupid notes), but I have done it when asked. So I would like to be able to insert my own text at any point between lines, ideally I would like to be able to distinguish between different categories of notes using a color scheme or some similar visually distinct tagging, and I would like to be able to export and share my notes with other people. I would like to do all of this without reloading the page. Is this functionality worth the price of JavaScript? There are no shoulds, and I can't that answer that for you, but it is an interactive aspect of a normal book that I can't see implementing with just HTML and CSS.

            • (Score: 2) by zocalo on Monday April 23 2018, @07:00AM (1 child)

              by zocalo (302) on Monday April 23 2018, @07:00AM (#670648)
              You don't need JavaScript for annotation, you just need a standardised way for an eBook reader to inject marked up comments into the source HTML using non-displaying tags that reference the actual content (which could be plain text or rich HTML) in a sidecar file, e.g something like:

              <annotation ID=1234>text being commented on</annotation>

              Alternatively, you could just have the annotations as a byte offset in the sidecar file if you don't mind a little more overhead when you re-open each chapter as they get re-inserted. Optionally, you could also add a user ID tag so multiple people could annotate the same ebook (who doesn't like reading the notes of a reference book's previous owner?), and since all of the annotations would be in a sidecar file it would be fairly straightfoward to redistribute the ebook with or without the notes. All the code required could then be natively compiled in the ebook reader, rather than providing a potential attack vector for malicious JavaScript embedded in the book. The only real gotcha I can think of so far would be if you manually shared the ebook without the sidecar file as it would then still have any inline annotation markup in place in the source, so an annotation supporting reader would need to be able to clean up or work around the orphaned annotation markup.

              --
              UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
              • (Score: 2) by JNCF on Monday April 23 2018, @07:49PM

                by JNCF (4317) on Monday April 23 2018, @07:49PM (#670852) Journal

                I like your proposal. I'd really like there to be something of this nature for webpages in general, though I'm sketchy on the details (tradeoffs are difficult). Of course, we're no longer strictly dealing with existing web technologies. That's fine, perhaps desirable, but I think my original post is still valid in context.

            • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @09:20AM (2 children)

              by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @09:20AM (#670663)

              The pencil you use to write in the margin of the dead-tree books isn't part of the book. It's the e-reader software that should enable you to make notes, not the e-book itself.

              • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @02:30PM

                by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @02:30PM (#670747)

                Yes, or there could be a dedicated side car file that keeps track of that along with the other user specific data like some digital cameras do. Making changes to the original file is asking for data corruption issues if you're unfortunate enough to have the device crash, run out of batteries or otherwise be prevented from finishing the write. At least if it's in a separate file, it's a lot easier to prevent corruption of the book which you may or may not have a different copy of. Not to mention that it makes it easier to identify if the backup is the same as the one you're reading.

              • (Score: 2) by JNCF on Monday April 23 2018, @07:54PM

                by JNCF (4317) on Monday April 23 2018, @07:54PM (#670854) Journal

                I'm not opposed to this solution (see my response to zocalo above), but arguing it based on a pencil analogy is ridiculous. Is bookmarking a function of a book, or a bookmark? Don't we still call it bookmarking when we use the dog-eared corner of a page? Ergo, sites and browsers should both implement bookmarking independently. Huzzah!

          • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Monday April 23 2018, @11:44AM

            by TheRaven (270) on Monday April 23 2018, @11:44AM (#670691) Journal

            The only thing about a book that needs to be interactive or change in any way during runtime is which page you're reading.

            I can think of lots of things I'd like to see be interactive in a book, but they should all be under the control of the reader, not the book. For example, being able to colour parts of speech, be able to pop up definitions of words, highlight different speakers in different typefaces or background colours, show the last time a particular topic was mentioned, and so on. These are all possible of more metadata is included in the book, they are not helped by the addition of a general-purpose programming languages.

            --
            sudo mod me up
          • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Wootery on Friday April 27 2018, @09:39AM

            by Wootery (2341) on Friday April 27 2018, @09:39AM (#672531)

            Seconded. Shouldn't EPUB just be a narrow subset of the web standards (decidedly not including JavaScript) + 7zip? Am I missing something?

            There are entire operating systems that are smaller and simpler than modern web browsers. There's no call for this complexity when publishing documents.

      • (Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @01:26AM (3 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @01:26AM (#670564)

        My site is JavaScript only, precisely to keep crusty old faggots like you out.
        It used to work without script, but I eventually realized that your type was undesirable, while being the most vocal. Empty vessel and such.

        • (Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @02:22AM (1 child)

          by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @02:22AM (#670579)

          Let's keep off each other's lawn.

          • (Score: 2) by Wootery on Friday April 27 2018, @09:45AM

            by Wootery (2341) on Friday April 27 2018, @09:45AM (#672532)

            Can't tell if that's declarative or imperative.

        • (Score: 2) by captain normal on Monday April 23 2018, @04:23AM

          by captain normal (2205) on Monday April 23 2018, @04:23AM (#670610)

          Yeah...sure...I'll bet it's all black background, with pink, green and blue text in varying fonts. With lots of flashing stars and cats, with mystery hyperlinks scattered about.

          --
          When life isn't going right, go left.
      • (Score: 4, Interesting) by looorg on Monday April 23 2018, @01:32AM

        by looorg (578) on Monday April 23 2018, @01:32AM (#670566)

        How else are they going to serve you advertisement and malware with your book? How are they going to track your reading habits if they can't place a few cookies and hidden tracking images on the pages.
        It doesn't really look like it's going to replace any paper books anytime soon if one asked me.

      • (Score: 4, Interesting) by jmorris on Monday April 23 2018, @01:42AM (7 children)

        by jmorris (4844) on Monday April 23 2018, @01:42AM (#670570)

        Seriously. Can anyone explain why a book needs to be executable content? That really is the heart of the problem here, once it is executable and connected to the network it is dangerous. Wrap DRM around it to make it opaque, unmodifiable and only viewable by a client application that is also opaque and unmodifiable and the only rational response is OH. HELL. NO.

        • (Score: 3, Insightful) by captain normal on Monday April 23 2018, @04:26AM

          by captain normal (2205) on Monday April 23 2018, @04:26AM (#670613)

          Really, all a book needs is .RTF all the rest is BS.

          --
          When life isn't going right, go left.
        • (Score: 4, Interesting) by FatPhil on Monday April 23 2018, @04:45AM (2 children)

          by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Monday April 23 2018, @04:45AM (#670620) Homepage
          Why is everyone pretending that PostScript doesn't exist.
          PS docs were *nothing but* executable content. The problem is the APIs accessible to that executable content. If it's nothing more than laying out information on the page, then it's fine.
          --
          Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @05:21AM

            by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @05:21AM (#670629)

            The Open XML Paper Specification [wikipedia.org] is probably what you want; my cursory reading suggests it's simply a declarative page-layout language.

            Though it's an open standard, it was was developed by Microsoft, who seems to remain its main (though lukewarm) proponent. So, there's that.

          • (Score: 4, Interesting) by jmorris on Monday April 23 2018, @06:08AM

            by jmorris (4844) on Monday April 23 2018, @06:08AM (#670636)

            When Postscript printers talked over serial ports it was safe enough to let them execute untrusted code. Basically just do a full reset to a known internal state between jobs and you are good. Once they got network ports the risk jumped, smash the stack and an attacker can escape to your internal network.

            This proposal mandates the full HTML/CSS/DOM/JS web stack implemented in a viewer trusted by everyone except the owner due to the DRM requirement. This is more like adding a full network access library to Postscript. And if you don't believe there is ill intent here, make a proposal to add a mandate that a book must default to no access to resources not bundled in the book itself without the client throwing a request for user authorization that clearly states what access is being sought and the information to be transmitted. See how fast the proposal gets shot down, because OF COURSE they intend to insert web trackers to track every page viewed, how long it was viewed, insert ads, etc. If it can't implement a Kindle Unlimited clone nobody will want it.

        • (Score: 3, Informative) by bzipitidoo on Monday April 23 2018, @05:42AM (1 child)

          by bzipitidoo (4388) on Monday April 23 2018, @05:42AM (#670632) Journal

          LaTeX must at the least be compiled, because programmatic methods were the best way to specify all kinds of mathematical notation from the most complicated down to the relatively simple that was still awkward to do in ASCII. UTF-8 has added just about every symbol under the sun, but it takes time for a change like that to reach everywhere. I don't know if LaTeX has been updated for UTF-8, but it wouldn't surprise me if it hasn't. Even if it had, programmatic methods would still be highly attractive.

          To draw anything that involves lots of repetition with slight differences, as can easily happen in an SVG picture, it becomes very hard to say no to programmatic methods. SVG is capable of a lot of copying with clever transforms, but it's still not a programming language, not even a dirt simple one such as Logo. So the choice can be to write several hundred SVG commands, each with a few tiny differences, or write one short JavaScript function. The same goes for CSS. CSS can really cut down basic repetition in HTML. but a programming language such as JavaScript is simply more powerful and flexible, able to neatly handle more complicated redundancy that CSS can only do with lots of repetition.

          • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @05:41PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @05:41PM (#670813)

            There are many modern extensions to (La)TeX. For Unicode support (and especially weird language support) check out XeLaTeX. It is still LaTeX, but with many bells and whistles.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @08:31PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @08:31PM (#670871)

          To keep the attention of the under 45 crowd. Else they'll drift off to some so-shul mee-dee-uh thing...

      • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @03:05AM (3 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @03:05AM (#670590)

        Agreed. Can you imagine what JS is going to do to battery life on an e-reader?

        Can't imagine any (non user-hostile) reason why anybody would want JS on an e-reader. I guess interstitial ads are the future of e-books?

        • (Score: 3, Informative) by Apparition on Monday April 23 2018, @03:56AM

          by Apparition (6835) on Monday April 23 2018, @03:56AM (#670599) Journal

          JavaScript in eBooks is not new. While EPUB 2 discouraged JavaScript, the spec didn't expressly forbid it. EPUB 3 has been around for six and a half years now, and expressly allows JavaScript for eBook interactivity.

        • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @12:51PM (1 child)

          by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @12:51PM (#670712)

          Hey, I give away my books for free. The least you could do is let it run the embedded cryptocurrency miner while you read.

          • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @08:36PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @08:36PM (#670876)

            i bought this thing, about an inch and a half thick. had all these pieces of paper in it, one edge of each piece glued to another piece of paper. couldn't find where the screen and controls, or the power switch, or where to put the batteries in, or the power plug....was weird.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @03:55PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @03:55PM (#670778)

      yeah... the while... hyperlink structure.. bookmarks.. pages...

      we already have it, it's called HTML.

      the rest is in how pretty the cover looks.

  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 22 2018, @11:54PM (24 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 22 2018, @11:54PM (#670530)

    The biggest problem is fidelity or reproducibility.

    For the most part, Web "developers" squander all their time ensuring that content renders properly across as many clients as possible. It's an enormous overhead, and there doesn't seem to be any hope of the situation improving; this is because both consumers and producers only care about shiny surface details rather than underlying foundations.

    Alas, Knuth long ago new that the problem of publishing is a problem of fidelity; in TeX, he not only created a superb collection of algorithms for laying out the content of books (albeit, the system which uses those algorithms is pretty ugly), but he also produced an output format long before PDF, intended to capture that layout in a completely reproducible fashion. It's too bad nobody outside of the hard sciences cared to build on his work.

    • (Score: 5, Insightful) by https on Monday April 23 2018, @01:34AM (5 children)

      by https (5248) on Monday April 23 2018, @01:34AM (#670568) Journal

      Your "squander" assessment is generous. Fidelity via HTML isn't a problem, it's fiction by design.

      The whole point of HTML is that the publisher does not know how client software shall render it, and isn't supposed to care. My client could be text-to-speech, and render an EM tag with exactly the same intonation but with a background sound effect of klaxons. Your client could be eye-tracking AI worthy of three Nobel Prizes and a Fields Medal, where whenever your eye is looking at text tagged EM, disco lights flicker on the back of the tablet - unless you're moving your gaze backwards. Alex could make one that vibrates the Braille pins, the showy bugger.

      All would be perfectly valid presentations.

      There's some overlap between them, but trying to treat HTML as similar to print shows a fundamental misunderstanding.

      --
      Offended and laughing about it.
      • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @01:40AM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @01:40AM (#670569)

        And yet designers make that mistake constantly, by insisting on pixel-perfect layouts, and artsy custom fonts.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @02:38AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @02:38AM (#670582)

          The problem is that clients just do not implement presentation rigorously, so it doesn't really matter what your CSS is—it is likely not to produce the same results between different systems.

      • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @02:27AM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @02:27AM (#670580)

        Christ. Do you plebs ever tire of your straw?

        Nobody claimed to use [just] HTML for those purposes. What the fuck do you think CSS (and, yes, Javascript) are for? Goddman PRESENTATION, that's what!

        Asshat.

        • (Score: 3, Touché) by maxwell demon on Monday April 23 2018, @04:24AM

          by maxwell demon (1608) on Monday April 23 2018, @04:24AM (#670611) Journal

          What the fuck do you think CSS (and, yes, Javascript) are for?

          Spying? <gd&r>

          --
          The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
      • (Score: 5, Interesting) by bradley13 on Monday April 23 2018, @08:00AM

        by bradley13 (3053) on Monday April 23 2018, @08:00AM (#670656) Homepage Journal

        "the publisher does not know how client software shall render it, and isn't supposed to care."

        well, yes, that's how it was supposed to be. The publisher could send their suggestions, but the client would - in the end - render the document however it wanted. For example, re-flowing text to match the actual window width. Of course, it took almost no time before marketing weenies - used to the world of print - wanted to dictate exactly how their pages should appear. Initially, they played with things like frames, to force a fixed-width presentation.

        This is part of what drove CSS, which was initially simple and understandable, into the abomination which became CSS/3. If you have never done so, go have a look at the sheer size of the CSS specifications - thousands of pages - then imagine actually trying to implement them. It's seriously insane, and it's driven by the need of publishers to control the precise presentation of their content - in direct contradiction to the original goals of the web.

        --
        Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
    • (Score: 3, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Monday April 23 2018, @02:08AM (13 children)

      by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Monday April 23 2018, @02:08AM (#670574) Journal

      It is quite possible that I never see anything on the web as the author intended. I long ago blocked web fonts. I see absolutely no reason why I should download some special font, just to read something. Documents render quite well, for the most part, without web fonts. I did install Google's collection of fonts after an article here on Soylent. The collection seems to make some difference, here and there, but I never cared enough to dig in to it.

      Bottom line, I don't need web fonts. My machine can cache enough fonts to make any document readable, including cyrillic and Asian fonts. If ever I need Hebrew, or some obscure language that I've never read in my life, I can install suitable fonts directly onto my machine.

      Do my documents look exactly like the one the author produced? Who knows? Who *really* gives a damn, other than the author? That author has no authority to decide that I must have some frivolous font before I can read his documents. That entire web font nonsense is frivolity taken to extremes.

      Paranthetically - using web fonts probably enables someone to track who is reading what.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @04:21AM (12 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @04:21AM (#670608)

        Typing a comment via a modern, high-end mobile Android phone is a clusterfuck.

        The Web sucks, and SoylentNews proves it over and over.

        • (Score: 4, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Monday April 23 2018, @04:29AM (6 children)

          by maxwell demon (1608) on Monday April 23 2018, @04:29AM (#670614) Journal

          Typing a comment is just typing plain old text. And SN uses a plain old text input box that existed since the dawn of the web. If Android doesn't handle that well, that's not a failure of the web. It's a failure of Android.

          --
          The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
          • (Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @04:47AM (5 children)

            by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @04:47AM (#670621)

            Seriously. Are you people fucking braindead? What's wrong with you?

            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @05:23AM (4 children)

              by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @05:23AM (#670630)

              Seriously. Are you people fucking braindead? What's wrong with you?

              Ah, I see, you've run out of arguments.

              No, wait, you never had any actual arguments to begin with.

              • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @05:36AM (3 children)

                by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @05:36AM (#670631)

                Are you braindead, too?

                • (Score: 3, Funny) by Runaway1956 on Monday April 23 2018, @06:06AM (2 children)

                  by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Monday April 23 2018, @06:06AM (#670634) Journal

                  Yes, we are all braindead, except for you. You are the one-eyed man in the land of the blind. Only you can save us from ourselves. ALL HAIL THE UNBRAINDEAD ANONYMOUS COWARD!!

                  • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @06:43AM (1 child)

                    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @06:43AM (#670644)

                    All of the AC's points still stand.

                    • (Score: 3, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @10:31AM

                      by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @10:31AM (#670672)

                      Well, since that AC had no point, that's vacuously true.

        • (Score: 3, Insightful) by captain normal on Monday April 23 2018, @04:33AM (4 children)

          by captain normal (2205) on Monday April 23 2018, @04:33AM (#670616)

          Typing anything on any "smart" phone is a clusterfuck. Likewise any tablet. If you need to type, get a keyboard.

          --
          When life isn't going right, go left.
          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @04:53AM (1 child)

            by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @04:53AM (#670624)

            SoylentNews adds a whole 'nother layer of hell.

            • (Score: 5, Insightful) by kazzie on Monday April 23 2018, @09:24AM

              by kazzie (5309) Subscriber Badge on Monday April 23 2018, @09:24AM (#670664)

              Given that you keep posting here, does that make you a masochist?

          • (Score: 1) by pTamok on Monday April 23 2018, @07:17AM (1 child)

            by pTamok (3042) on Monday April 23 2018, @07:17AM (#670652)

            Typing anything on any "smart" phone is a clusterfuck. Likewise any tablet. If you need to type, get a keyboard.

            Hats nit true, the worm predictor get sit right often enough too bee useless. You don't heed yo tripe so many skerries in the retinitis.

            (To be fair, the predictor on my phone allows me to type the above sentence correctly* using 56 keystrokes, instead of 111. I've often wanted a word predictor like that in my word processor, but I'm not a touch typist. In any case, typing is rarely the problem, it's all the other UI elements and processes around an input field that make the experience suck.)

            *That's not true, the word predictor gets it right often enough to be useful. You don't need to type so many letters on the keyboard.

            • (Score: 2) by captain normal on Monday April 23 2018, @08:03PM

              by captain normal (2205) on Monday April 23 2018, @08:03PM (#670857)

              Yes, but you really need to proofread carefully.

              --
              When life isn't going right, go left.
    • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Arik on Monday April 23 2018, @04:08AM (3 children)

      by Arik (4543) on Monday April 23 2018, @04:08AM (#670602) Journal
      "The biggest problem is fidelity or reproducibility."

      The biggest problem is *the inappropriate expectation of* fidelity or reproducibility.

      The web's design goals excluded WYSIWYG from the beginning, for good reason. You can't have proper device independence and "fidelity" as you term it - perversely referring to fidelity of *presentation* rather than of content.

      It's not just that those who don't rememeber LaTeX keep re-inventing it, poorly - it's that they've succeed in shoe-horning their desires into web standards where they have no place at all.
      --
      If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @04:31AM (2 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @04:31AM (#670615)

        Why does CSS offer measurements like "6in" for "6 inches" then? What's the point of that?

        The real problem is you fuckers fake everything. The CSS half-wits thought it would make sense to re-define "pixel" as a stable measurement: 1 pixel on a "virtual" 90 PPI screen. Why? Because all the moronic, mathless user-experience "engineers" in the world built their tasteless designs around Wintel and the commonest monitors, which were 90 PPI (maybe Microsoft is the one who introduced that stupidity; I don't know). Well, that same fakeness and incompetence seeped into the base models of everything else in Web layout, such that the only sane way for most people do deal with positioning and dimensioning elements is to use a Javascript library to do the calculations on the client at "run-time". But that doesn't matter, anyway, because 20-something-year-old hey-I-just-want-go-climbing-and-hiking-and-post-to-facebook wunderkinds are responsible for coding up these clients.

        The problem is not as you describe it.

        The problem is that the "Oooo-look-shiny-object" morons are in control of the foundations of our society's infrastructure. We need a reboot.

        • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Arik on Monday April 23 2018, @11:41AM (1 child)

          by Arik (4543) on Monday April 23 2018, @11:41AM (#670689) Journal
          "Why does CSS offer measurements like "6in" for "6 inches" then? What's the point of that?"

          "The problem is not as you describe it. The problem is that the "Oooo-look-shiny-object" morons are in control of the foundations of our society's infrastructure."

          CSS is not part of the original design. It was added at the insistence of that same "morons" as you put it, and the justification at the time was that they were already abusing the heck out of HTML trying to control layout, and if we could get them to move that nonsense to a separate CSS file it would result in cleaner HTML files and easier-to-ignore presentation nonsense.

          Very similar to the justifications given for adding ecmascript as well.

          HTML is hated by "designers" because it is a functional system, not an aesthetic one, and they are the opposite. But this is their malfunction.
          --
          If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @02:18PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @02:18PM (#670741)

            Stylesheets are an ancient idea that are part of an important separation of structure and presentation, and a concept on which the venerated Tim Berners–Lee also apparently worked. Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:

            CSS was first proposed by Håkon Wium Lie on October 10, 1994.[19] At the time, Lie was working with Tim Berners-Lee at CERN.[20] Several other style sheet languages for the web were proposed around the same time, and discussions on public mailing lists and inside World Wide Web Consortium resulted in the first W3C CSS Recommendation (CSS1)[21] being released in 1996. In particular, Bert Bos' proposal was influential; he became co-author of CSS1 and is regarded as co-creator of CSS.[22]

            Style sheets have existed in one form or another since the beginnings of Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) in the 1980s, and CSS was developed to provide style sheets for the web.[23] One requirement for a web style sheet language was for style sheets to come from different sources on the web. Therefore, existing style sheet languages like DSSSL and FOSI were not suitable. CSS, on the other hand, let a document's style be influenced by multiple style sheets by way of "cascading" styles.[23]

            […]

            --
            Circumcised knowledge leads to circumcised thought. Proof: Arik

  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @01:18AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @01:18AM (#670561)

    I don't know about any of you, but I use EPUB to read books.

    The last thing I want is web "features" in my reading material. Floating navigation, web bugs, google analytics, javascript, battery murdering DRM extensions.

  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Kilo110 on Monday April 23 2018, @01:23AM

    by Kilo110 (2853) Subscriber Badge on Monday April 23 2018, @01:23AM (#670562)
  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Monday April 23 2018, @04:02AM (3 children)

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Monday April 23 2018, @04:02AM (#670601) Journal

    It's bad enough what the web has evolved into. Please don't evolve ebooks into the same.

    A format strictly based on Web technologies and when I say "Web technologies", I mean the most basic ones: html, CSS, JavaScript, SVG and friends

    No problem with HTML, CSS and SVG, but please, do not include JavaScript.

    If you want the web browser be able to open ebooks, just implement EPUB in the browser.

    Also note:

    The EPUB 3.1 specification has been rescinded because it is too costly and complex for the eBook industry to adopt.

    And to help with this, you want to adopt an even more complex standard?

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
    • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @12:59PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @12:59PM (#670718)

      And to help with this, you want to adopt an even more complex standard?

      When the barrier to adoption is merely having an HTML renderer, there are a multitude of WebBook readers in existence already, many open-source and permissively licensed. Heck, I'm pretty sure just about every dedicated ebook reader on the planet already has one installed.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @02:42PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @02:42PM (#670753)

      The issue isn't that the web has evolved, I doubt anybody really wants to go back to what the web was like 20 years ago. The issue is that it's evolving to make it easier for bad actors to exploit people cruising the web with insufficient consideration being paid to what that does for the users as well as insufficient power being given to control the data collection.

      There have been badly designed websites that arguably shouldn't have been allowed for as long as I can remember. I remember there being web pages that would take 10 minutes to load because they used all sorts of graphics rather than text for things and others that were comprised nearly entirely of flash or shockwave. But, with an open system, you get things like that.

      If the web wasn't allowed to evolve, you'd just see it be superseded by something else and that something else may not be as good.

      • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday April 23 2018, @03:59PM

        by maxwell demon (1608) on Monday April 23 2018, @03:59PM (#670782) Journal

        The issue isn't that the web has evolved,

        Yeah, that's why I wrote (emphasis added):

        It's bad enough what the web has evolved into. Please don't evolve ebooks into the same.

        Those able to read are at a clear advantage. ;-)

        --
        The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
  • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @04:14AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @04:14AM (#670604)

    ebooks read you!

  • (Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Monday April 23 2018, @06:07AM (1 child)

    by bzipitidoo (4388) on Monday April 23 2018, @06:07AM (#670635) Journal

    What I find uninspiring about epub is that it is, basically, a subset of HTML, zipped. It's a zipped up web page. I mean, sure it's neat to not reinvent the wheel. But what does epub really do that HTML can't? Is collecting everything together in a zip file that big a deal? Why bother packaging a book in epub when the same thing can be done in HTML?

    Sure, there's room for lots of improvement in HTML, and by extension epub. This WebBook proposal is sort of halfway between epub and HTML. Doesn't sound like it brings any compelling improvement.

    A list of requirements is, however, a good start. Most of these standards are developed without rigor and good reason, just ad hoc messes, chock full of hastily made arbitrary decisions.

    • (Score: 5, Insightful) by TheRaven on Monday April 23 2018, @11:54AM

      by TheRaven (270) on Monday April 23 2018, @11:54AM (#670695) Journal

      But what does epub really do that HTML can't?

      Wrong question. Being able to do less is a feature, because explicitly reducing the expressiveness of ePub means that you can have far simpler viewers than a full web browser.

      --
      sudo mod me up
  • (Score: 3, Funny) by realDonaldTrump on Monday April 23 2018, @08:54AM

    by realDonaldTrump (6614) on Monday April 23 2018, @08:54AM (#670660) Homepage Journal

    I love Daniel's idea. But the Establishment publishers, the Fake News Media, and the global special interests won't love it. Because it means any website can become a cyberbook, and any cyberbook can become a website. Very easily & quickly. It's tremendous for me, personally. Because I have so many wonderful books. And so many wonderful websites. I'll be able to write one thing, it'll be a cyberbook and it'll also be a website. With the press of a button. I won't need a publisher, I'll just get a cyber guy to press that button for me. So easy! My tweets here, my tweets on Twitter -- I tell the guy, press the button. And out comes my WebBook, How I Made America Great Again, by Donald J. Trump. Beautiful!

  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Lester on Monday April 23 2018, @09:48AM (4 children)

    by Lester (6231) on Monday April 23 2018, @09:48AM (#670668) Journal

    FictionBook 2 (FB2) [wikipedia.org] is the best standard for books. It is strictly XML. It is semantic, it has chapters (sections) paragraphs, titles, cites, poetry, stanzas, verses, footnotes etc. The eReader must know what everything means, how it indexes contents, or displays titles or subtitles or metadata is up to the eReader. It is the best way to store a book to convert to any other format, ePUB, Mobi....

    By the way, ePUB footnotes have been a missing until ePUB3 !!!! Every converting tool did its best to include footnotes, and blogs were full of question about this; And automatic tools to convert from ePUB had problems to recognize footnotes and were wrongly exported to other formats that supported footnotes. And even the new standard is confusing with two ways. A book standard without a clear definition of footnotes is absurd. And the new WebBook standard doesn't say a word about it, once again, everybody will implement their way.

    Unfortunately, FB2 is not supported by every reader.

    • (Score: 2) by Apparition on Monday April 23 2018, @11:00PM (3 children)

      by Apparition (6835) on Monday April 23 2018, @11:00PM (#670928) Journal

      So, intrigued by your post, I looked some into FictionBook 2.

      A couple of things I discovered: It's primarily used in Russia. (In Soviet Russia, FictionBook uses you. There, got it out of the way.)

      Secondly, it's been superseded by FictionBook 3 [publishingperspectives.com]. FB3 is quite different than FB2, and is basically a ZIP file similar to EPUB albeit more simple.

      Interesting.

      • (Score: 3, Informative) by Lester on Tuesday April 24 2018, @09:57AM (2 children)

        by Lester (6231) on Tuesday April 24 2018, @09:57AM (#671095) Journal

        It's primarily used in Russia.

        It was created in Russia, and unfortunately part of documentation is only in Russian. Nevertheless it is used a lot out of Russia. In Spain (here I am) one of the first eReaders (Papyre) had FB2 as a it is main format. And there was a reason, rendering a fb2 is much simpler than an ePUB. With ePUB the software must be able to display html with its billon of attributes, tags and CSS. Fb2 is much simpler.

        It was simpler to render, it was free, and it was easy to write with a simple text editor (In fact, I corrected typos from books and uploaded it, I programed a tool from Asciidoc to FB2), or an XML editor, and it was ease to make tools.

        (In Soviet Russia, FictionBook uses you. There, got it out of the way.)

        ??? Expand it, please.

        it's been superseded by FictionBook 3

        FB3 is new and almost not used. Don't know in Russia, but out of Russia it is basically unknown. Even its page [github.com] has a tool to convert to FB2 because there are almost no readers. But let's wait

        FB3 is quite different than FB2, and is basically a ZIP file similar to EPUB

        No, it is not that different. And no, it is not similar to ePUB.

        FB2 is a long single XML file. FB3 has split it in several files and zipped all in file. That is not the ePUB way, but libreoffice way, docx way, Debian packages way, and many, many formats way

        On the other hand, the main changes are that inf FB2 images where stored in the XML codified as base64, now they are stored as separate proper img files, so you save 33%. Meta data (author, date, published....) was in the same XML, now it is in separated files. And allows a little more about presentation (indented and floating blocks) etc.

        The main difference is still there. Contrary to ePUB that uses html standard (that is quite complex, let alone html5), FB3 uses the same XML sematic of FB2 with a few additions and splits XML in several files.

        • (Score: 1) by purple_cobra on Tuesday April 24 2018, @11:25PM (1 child)

          by purple_cobra (1435) on Tuesday April 24 2018, @11:25PM (#671418)

          The Soviet Russia thing is an ancient Slashdot meme; "In Soviet Russia, Facebook uses you!", that kind of thing. I'm sure some kind soul will post the origins of it if you wait long enough!

          Reading through this discussion and the links provided by various commenters does make me want to buy a Kobo Aura One. I have a love/hate relationship with my Kindle, a second gen PaperWhite; there's just something about it that feels awkward, no matter what settings I tweak. Calibre, despite its somewhat busy interface, is still far and away the best method for managing books, the Kindle software being about as basic and simplistic as possible.

          • (Score: 2) by Lester on Wednesday April 25 2018, @08:51AM

            by Lester (6231) on Wednesday April 25 2018, @08:51AM (#671551) Journal

            I have to admit that since I began using eReaders I don't "manage" books anymore, they are disposable items, "read and delete". I only use Calibre to convert eBooks. My main source of eBooks are in fb2 format, and I convert to mobi. The conversion works very well. Converting from fb2 to other format is straightforward, converting from ePUB, PDF or HTML to other formats is not as clean.

            The first eReader I bought was a disappointment (Papyre 6.2) is was slow, I almost couldn't browse the list of books. But when I stopped tinkering and began to read a book, every problem disappeared. So, as long as I can read a book, pass pages, read footnotes, no eReader is awkward for me. And if it has an English dictionary (I'm Spaniard and I need it), then I'm in heaven.

(1)