Re: eBook Ignoramus Authors



Robbie wrote:
In article <1227856853@xxxxxxxxx>, throopw@xxxxxxxxx (Wayne Throop) wrote:


Huh? Plain text is easy to bookmark.

No it is not.


You just store the line number somewheres,

Exactly. But where do you store this? Every software program uses somewhere different, and none (that I know of anyway) include this with the actual file, which means the bookmark does not move with the book if it is transfered to another computer or such.


I imagine it's also trivial in any number of viewing tools, from vi to emacs,

It's a *bookmark* for fucks sake. We should not be limiting "bookmarking technology" to those who know what vi or emacs is.


Basically, unix tools make text your bitch.

They might be nice when you are trying to grep through some log files or do some data munging, but they do not apply here. "Here" meaning "how does joe sixpack use a bookmark", not "how can I hack around crappy file format limitations".

It is of course trivial to define a bookmark format for plain text, you could simply say that the first line of the file contained:
"Bookmark: <line number>"
And Bob would be your uncle. The problem is no software supports this.


HTML is maybe a *little* bit harder, but even there, if you're using
firefox, you can open tabs to save as many positions as you want, and you
can arrange to save your tabs when you quite the browser. Save as many
tabs in as many documents as you want that way, for as long as you want.
So not really all that hard, either. And works with plain text, for
that matter.

Again, this is a crappy work around.

A dead tree bookmark is the worlds simplest interface. It is a quite telling commentary on the lousy state of computer software that we have not managed to lick this problem.

It's also one of the many reasons I normally read books in dead-tree form only. They are easy to carry, need no battery (so battery life is infinite, you might say), are super easy to bookmark, and bright sunlight does not turn them black. I can borrow millions of them from the library at zero cost, or buy the ones that are worth it, in either case without worrying about whether or not the text is in a suitable format for my reader. They are even made of renewable and recyclable materials, and don't need to be treated as toxic waste if discarded.

--
Wanted dead and/or alive: Shroedinger's cat.

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