My dislike of Kindle (A.K.A. Mobipocket) is only about its presentation limitations. I guess that comes from being a high volume producer and having to deliver the bad news about the Mobi limitations to publishers every day. And now apparently Amazon announce that their non-forward compatible format will be available on the non-backwardly compatible Windows 7.0. That all seems such a move in the right direction! Especially if we really want to make compelling e-books that are not poor cousins of print but rather a new publishing genre. So many exciting publishing opportunities crushed by Mobi-mediocrity and Win-unwind.
When Amazon announces support for e-pub, that will be something to announce (of course if they ever do they wont include SVG support and will use some quirky rendering engine). E-pub may not be perfect, but it is about a zillion light years ahead of the '90s crap being shoved into our lives as innovation.
On another topic, I am seriously forced to say some really nice things about Stanza on the iPod/Phone. It does a better job of presenting complex structured content than its cousin readers with more screen real estate and boring e-Ink technology. I am a fan of mobile deliver, but my old eyes were waiting for something with a bigger screen to come along. But it was there all the time. Congratulations to the development team at Stanza. The application really delivers for in-the-field reference content, and touch for image enlargement is only a little irritating. Just don't drop the device!
It's probably not the new Gutenberg moment in waiting, but it is a serious step forward. Talking of which I just watched Stephen Fry's excellent BBC4 tele-doc on Gutenberg over on YourTube last week almost by mistake. If you haven't seen it, it is probably minimally inspiring if you are into publishing change management and innovation, and not just in it for the money.
And another little buggy thing
By the way Adobe and Stanza (A.K.A. Amazon). We found another interesting and slightly obscure bug in your renderers. If you use table footer in the correct accessibility position after table header - the footers render in the same position. OK. It's not as big a deal as the ADE display:table bug, because after all who has ever really used XHTML accessibility table footers. We certainly don't as a rule of thumb and it was just because in a fit of standards compliance over-reach we produced one slightly technical set of information service documents that highlighted this problem. We immediately went back to the lazy habit of making the last row of body a pseudo footer with some spot styling. Much better.
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