The People’s E-Book Gets Funded on Kickstarter

“The People’s E-Book will handle ebooks of all sizes and scope, but it will excel in areas that no one else has cared to consider—the very small, the quick and dirty, the simple, and the experimental. The People’s E-book is a super-simple online tool with an intuitive visual interface to allow anyone to make ebooks quickly and for free. This is barebones ebook publishing.”

Hum, isn’t it what PressBooks has been doing for months now?

I’m by no means judging anyone (the more, the merrier) but there is a lot of contenders in this field today and very very few can guarantee good quality outputs — I’m not saying high quality. Usually, it’s all about “yeah we will make a simple tool”, then “OMG we have serious technical issues”, then “Ok, we don’t have any solution, those issues are now critical”, then “hey look at what others are doing, let’s check the quality of the files made by big groups who are outsourcing in India”, and finally “ok, those issues are not critical after all, same crap as what those big groups do, crap is the norm”.

I really hope the people’s ebook will achieve a good service, but judging by the quality of the files a lot of such services export, I’m quite scared for ebooks and e-readers. Quality is already a big issue as ereading apps’ developers and vendors must manage (CSS overrides, KePub which was a radical solution for enhancing the overall quality of the crappy files they had to sell, etc.) the unmanageable a.k.a HTML and CSS a web dev would die just looking at it since even basic HTML markup is not done properly, let’s hope the devs they hire will do things well.