The chance I’m going to change browsers to view any website is zero. Build a visitor friendly website.

Christine: most of the problems that you seem to experience are probably based on your browser too. Keep in mind that IE is much slower than any other browser for Javascript and parsing a very long text will be significantly longer in this browser, and there’s basically no “paste event” in Firefox. Try any Webkit based browser and you’ll see a massive performance boost. I can work around some of these problems to improve things but it’ll always depend on the browser and the client’s ressources too. Catching a paste event, sanitizing the text (for example removing all the trash that you get when you’re pasting from Word) and white-listing the XHTML are actions that are far from trivial yet necessary. As I’ve pointed out though, we could connect our service to pretty much anything: offering a desktop component might be a good alternative in this case (or even a RIA client based on Webkit).
As for the structure of the text, I’ll work on drag&drop to re-order the element but as David said in his post, the easiest thing to do is to work on the structure first and then the content. We have some very complex books with dozens of sections inside various parts/chapters that were directly uploaded this way by their author.

Re adding books to feedbooks: it’s the user interface that is the problem. It is difficult to work with the way it is set up. It’s slow and you can’t go back and add in parts after you pass that section, and you can’t look at an entire chapter at once (without difficulty getting it open), and the darn view jumps to the top so it’s nearly impossible to accomplish anything on a particular section. I sent my complaints with suggestions to make it better, but never heard back. I like very much that all the books end up with tables of contents that work well (mobipocket books), and that’s all fine if you are just copying and pasting text without trying to do any further formatting. If you want to do more, it’s very difficult. It could be made much easier to work with and still achieve the same goals.

As I said, that was my experience a few months back. And I haven’t been back to try again. Nor do I see any reason to unless I see a feedbooks announcement about the new easy user interface.

Of course, it’s a gigantic pain to detect (and proofread) the semantic reason for italics (emphasis, foreign words, onomatopoeia, titles, etc.)…

ePub exists after many years of efforts by technical people and publishers to come up with an optimized standard for e-books—something fit for just about everything, from simple-layout novels to scientific, technical and mathematical works with complex requirements for presentation

Adobe is just one member of the IDPF. Jon Noring and I dislike DRM, and my own feeligs against it have actually intensified in recent years (even though I’d reluctantly agree to DRMed distributions of my own writings, because the would-be monopolists at Amazon and the rest leave us with no choice). We used OpenReader.org to jog the IDPF into finally taking e-book standards seriously. We had this bizarre idea that e-books ought to be as easy to buy and own as audio CDs.

Yes, public libraries can exist without DRM. One possibility would be “permanent check outs”—books that patrons could keep forever but not distribute in public. The books could use social DRM, with patron-specific information included in files, rather than traditional DRM.

What’s more, especially once WiMax or equivalent took off, libraries could let people browse individual, password-protected URLs for limited periods of time. People could still pirate, technically; but then they can with traditional DRM just by scanning p-books. Perhaps the files for remote browsing would also have patron-specific information embedded.

I don’t see traditional DRM as vanishing immediately from libraries, but as you can see, there are alternatives well worth exploring. I also think that shorter, fairer copyright terms could help a lot by bringing more books into the public domain, so libraries could just give books away rather than simply lending them. In some cases perhaps a TeleRead-style library system could buy up copyrights so that in effect they expired ahead of time. I’d love to see a lot more DRM-free books public domain books for your useful free-books roundup to point to.

Thanks,
David

What I don’t understand is why epub isn’t just another adobe drm format. You’re advocating no drm at all? So what’s wrong with drm-less other formats? I’m clearly not getting why epub is so special.

And I have a question about ebook libraries – without drm they can’t exist, right? Or do you advocate drm for that purpose? (Time limited use of borrowed library books.)

Thanks,
David

I don’t know if feedbooks made any changes, I certainly suggested some, but if not and you want to do anything beyond a few straight text chapters, it’s not easy. At least that was my experiece.

By the way, manybooks.net also provides epub format books.