The failure of the tech world to produce a truly good, useful, immersive, generative mobile media device and ecosystem is profoundly troubling.
The challenges are not technical, nor are they inherent to devices. I supect it's a combination of business models and IP law (copyright, patents, and others) which are holding us back.
In the past 24 hours, I've been tracking down works by an author, including one book for which Worldcat has a single listing, Amazon has none, and a few physical copies may be found apparently with a surviving co-author, at, as it happens, Edith Cowan University in Australia.
Oh: and Google have digitised this work, much of it is readable through the abysmal Google Books interface. But with sufficient limitations that I'd prefer re-typing the content by hand, as I've done for other works:
This allows me to produce multile formats readily via Pandoc, including HTML, PDF, ePub, and others.
I've used several ebook readers, all have distinct limitations. Pocketbook on Android is amomg the better, though its poor metadata management (No author field!!! Abysmal editing interface) is a constant frustration.
For Apple, lack of a mature console userland as with Android's Termux is a killer. For Android, everything but Termux is abysmal.
Comments
The failure of the tech world to produce a truly good, useful, immersive, generative mobile media device and ecosystem is profoundly troubling.
The challenges are not technical, nor are they inherent to devices. I supect it's a combination of business models and IP law (copyright, patents, and others) which are holding us back.
In the past 24 hours, I've been tracking down works by an author, including one book for which Worldcat has a single listing, Amazon has none, and a few physical copies may be found apparently with a surviving co-author, at, as it happens, Edith Cowan University in Australia.
Oh: and Google have digitised this work, much of it is readable through the abysmal Google Books interface. But with sufficient limitations that I'd prefer re-typing the content by hand, as I've done for other works:
https://pastebin.com/raw/fZajYSGa
This allows me to produce multile formats readily via Pandoc, including HTML, PDF, ePub, and others.
I've used several ebook readers, all have distinct limitations. Pocketbook on Android is amomg the better, though its poor metadata management (No author field!!! Abysmal editing interface) is a constant frustration.
For Apple, lack of a mature console userland as with Android's Termux is a killer. For Android, everything but Termux is abysmal.