Comment by jtbayly | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jtbayly | Hacker News Reader

I’m always looking out for digital book publishing systems. This article invites me to check out three books published using Pollen. It then asks two questions.

> Are they better than the last digital books you encountered?

Sadly, they aren’t. One lacks any navigation on the pages. The others have some navigation, but lack an accessible TOC on the page for context, something I have come to expect from digital books. Furthermore there is no way to search the contents of the book. This is a non-negotiable in my book. Pun intended. :)

Also missing, is any other format, such as PDF and ePub, which is also a deal-breaker for me, as I want my books to work for as wide an audience as possible.

> Would you like your next digital book to work like that?

No thanks. But the design is nice. I hope the system keeps improving.

What is your preferred digital book publishing system?

Right now I’m leaning toward Quarto.

Here is a link straight to book info: https://quarto.org/docs/books/

> Also missing, is any other format, such as PDF and ePub, which is also a deal-breaker for me, as I want my books to work for as wide an audience as possible.

Isn’t ePub just zipped XHTML? And you can easily turn HTML into PDF by using the “print to PDF” feature.

Yes for epub - but not really for HTML to PDF, yes you can convert it but you do not get all the detailed niceties you get from say a LaTex to pdf transition, probably OK for a fiction or similar book but not a technical one.

EPUB has lots of nuances beyond the XHTML files. There's the structure of the folders, lots of XML files, how to name, link, and namespace things. It is not as straightforward and zipping a bunch of XHTML files.

On the one hand, yes. On the other hand, my point is that I don’t want to have to lookup the spec and figure it out and then write my own script to take one of these books and make an epub.

Or go through the process manually of printing 20 separate web pages and then merging them into one PDf and then figuring out how to create a table of contents at the beginning and a bibliography at the end with links that actually work.

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