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Your ePub Is fine

andreklein.net

121–130 of 322 posts

Re: Your ePub Is fine

#121
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I was an average-joe high school student back then. People hated flash. Even non techies.

what? no? people generally loved, especially with the likes of frog in a blender...

for the younguns https://archive.org/details/joe-cartoon-frog-blender#

Re: Your ePub Is fine

#122
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hello, I'm building https://merrilin.ai , could I pick your brain about the problems you faced?

Sure thing. I've actually been working on the spoiler-free resource angle as well. I can book a call to talk. Distribution is the killer problem here though.

Yay! Please do, or email me at mail [at] stonecharioteer.com

Re: Your ePub Is fine

#123
I understand the frustration of the author but how many readers do have an old, unupgraded, maybe unupgradable epub reader? If authors want to make their work available to all readers they have to build for the least common denominator. If it happens to be something from 2013, sorry but that's the reality of the market.

Re: Your ePub Is fine

#124
post #106
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure thing. I've actually been working on the spoiler-free resource angle as well. I can book a call to talk. Distribution is the killer problem here though.

I thought about building this too! Love that both of you are pursuing it as I haven't had the time to start. Don't give up.

Yay! Registrations to https://merrilin.ai are open and you can enjoy a free account for as long as I can afford to give it (I have no funding lol). The android app is ready for closed testing too, if you have an Android device, mail me at mail [at] stonecharioteer.com and I'll add you to the beta testing. ios is still a pain.

Re: Your ePub Is fine

#125

I don't like .epub. I understand the reasons why this format exists, and I am 100% behind those reasons. But it's because I don't find any EPUB readers appealing to me. Just give me a FoxIt Reader clone for .epub, that's all. But naaaah!!, every single fucking e-pub reader that I tried must be a fucking library collector instead, like it's 2000's Windows Media Player style. I hate that. As such, whenever I get my han…

Have you tried foliate? Their embedded reader works quite well for me.

Re: Your ePub Is fine

#126
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No mobile OS could have run it solidly and without sucking batteries like no tomorrow. By the time mobile could run Flash, it was too late. Between Apple & Adobe, it had no shot of making the transition. But before that, Flash was pretty amazing.

It was never amazing. It was adequate to give creative people a way to work around its many shortcomings and make something cool anyway. The tech and the implementation was awful, and all credit goes to people who still managed to shine through it. For all the many reasons people might dislike Apple, they were 100% in the right on this topic. Flash needed to die. It got everyone to collectively push the web standard…

And yet, there was no html5 newgrounds. The magic of flash was that it gave a space where a music person, an art person, and a programmer could bang something out. The barrier to entry was comically low, which allowed an absolute explosion of content.

Sometimes good products happen despite bad technical foundations.

Re: Your ePub Is fine

#127
I once read an ebook that was formatted by a guy who had only ever done magazines and it was a huge mess. 2 columns of text per page. No auto scaling.

The best ebook format I have ever experienced is .txt and just let the software figure out where the text needs to go.

Re: Your ePub Is fine

#128

I don't like .epub. I understand the reasons why this format exists, and I am 100% behind those reasons. But it's because I don't find any EPUB readers appealing to me. Just give me a FoxIt Reader clone for .epub, that's all. But naaaah!!, every single fucking e-pub reader that I tried must be a fucking library collector instead, like it's 2000's Windows Media Player style. I hate that. As such, whenever I get my han…

As someone who loves FoxIt reader, I'm building https://merrilin.ai to be the best damned ebook reader out there, to support PDF and epub. FoxIt's annotation system is one of the best I've experienced and I want to design one that is just as good if not better.

Re: Your ePub Is fine

#129
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No mobile OS could have run it solidly and without sucking batteries like no tomorrow. By the time mobile could run Flash, it was too late. Between Apple & Adobe, it had no shot of making the transition. But before that, Flash was pretty amazing.

It was never amazing. It was adequate to give creative people a way to work around its many shortcomings and make something cool anyway. The tech and the implementation was awful, and all credit goes to people who still managed to shine through it. For all the many reasons people might dislike Apple, they were 100% in the right on this topic. Flash needed to die. It got everyone to collectively push the web standard…

> The tech and the implementation was awful, and all credit goes to people who still managed to shine through it.

Sorry, that's simply not true. The tech was ahead of its time. The implementation was intuitive. Only developers and Steve Jobs hated it, because Flash made it way too easy for anyone to make something fun.

Re: Your ePub Is fine

#130

I understand the frustration of the author but how many readers do have an old, unupgraded, maybe unupgradable epub reader? If authors want to make their work available to all readers they have to build for the least common denominator. If it happens to be something from 2013, sorry but that's the reality of the market.

I read this as saying a new Kobo in 2026 uses Adobe drm software that has css rules stuck in 2013.
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