> I've got the somewhat grandiose title of Production Manager at
> Bookmice.com. We publish paperbacks, and also ebooks in various formats
> - lit, pdf, reb, and of course Palm.
Currently, I count 17 separate DOC formats which can be read to one
extent or another on the Palm. Only three of those are "open", and two of
them are mutually similar (PalmDOC and ztxt; flat 7-bit ascii text only, no
formatting or images). I don't envy your job in selecting one to choose from
=)
> I don't want to use bog-standard PalmDocs, because of the lack even the
> most basic formatting such as italics or bold.
..or images, or bookmarks, or clickable links, or mailto tags, or..
You've now seen why Plucker's format exists.
> The field pretty quickly (and for reasons that I won't bore you with)
> narrows to two file formats - Blue Nomad's RTF-based WordSmith format,
> and your own HTML-based Plucker format.
What features were used to narrow them down to these two, out of
curiousity? extensibility? portability? size? compatiblity? open vs. closed?
> Both are excellent, both can do pretty much everything that I need a
> file format to be able to do, but Plucker, as I'm sure you realize, has
> more. Plus, you've got the grooviest doc reader I've seen.
...and it even does webpages!
It's only recently turned into a DOC reader over the past year or
so. Prior to that, we have concentrated most of our efforts on the web side
of things.
> My question is this -- what would be your attitude to Bookmice making
> Plucker our default format? This would necessitate that we include a
> copy of the Plucker viewer with every Palm eBook we sell, so that all
> the user has to do it install the eBook and also install the viewer
> .prc.
Personally, I've got no problems with it, but the rest of the team
would have to speak. The viewer itself is maintained by Mike, so he's the
one to ask on that point. A question though... how do the users install the
eBooks onto their Palm? Are they going to simply double-click on the .pdb
file and install it using Hotsync Manager (assuming Windows)? Or do you give
them an installer as well? As you know, with the addition of the parser for
their OS, they can create their own "eBooks" from webpages and local files
and so on.
> In the readme.txt, we could explain (in whatever degree of detail you
> felt to be a good idea) that the Plucker viewer is just a part of the
> larger Plucker suite, and we could include your site url, of course.
Including a link or pointer to our website would be a great way for
them to learn about Plucker, and to download the parser for their OS, so
they can then use it to continue to create their own versions of Plucker
documents and "eBooks" for themselves.
> Also, on the Bookmice Palm page, we could explain why we use Plucker
> format, what the full version of Plucker does, and of course link to the
> Plucker site.
There's about 20 reasons to use Plucker over most other readers and
DOC formats. For me, the most important ones are the fact that it's open,
extremely well documented format, and supports compression. For others,
there may be other benefits. Since it's an open format, whatever it lacks, I
can add myself.
> What do you think? Would this be OK with you folks?
I'm ok with it, it sounds mutually beneficial to both of our groups.
We would gain the addition of more users to test and help develop the
project, and you would gain a larger userbase of users and we could point
existing Plucker users to your website as well, to download copies of
"eBooks" for their Palms.
I'm in support of this from what I read so far. Anyone else?
/d
