After more than a decade of digitizing and processing everything: trade, academic and education books, preservation archive content; in English, Spanish, French, German, Arabic, Malay, Thai and a few other languages, you start to think you have seen it all.
We have had enough "One chapter" books for these not to be considered a rarity, but just last week we got our first ONE PARAGRAPH book. Yep! No kidding. 485KB - one paragraph, one book. Forget about test cases, we didn't even think it was needed (and hopefully wont be needed again).
The Sony BBeB was going to gag on that of course. We consulted the author via the publisher and got four recommended break points to get it into BBeB memory management to create an ePub spine that would work.
However the Sony device still didn't like the absence of paragraphs, I guess because we all know a paragraph just can't be that long. The poor little device created occasional breaks in the text, at it's own discretion. We tried many rearrangements of the various components but couldn't make the device to correctly continuously paginate even with four sections. ADE did OK, as of course did AZARDI, but then they have the resources of the desktop available.
So the lessons are:
- You have never seen it all no matter how old you get.
- The "creative process" will always bring every standard, technology and process invented to its knees at sometime or other
- Authors, please don't write one paragraph books, it irritates the workers, the machinery and the Reading devices.
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