I discovered something very early on while I was attempting to become knowledgable about the code that drives an e-book. Code is a hard thing to learn. There are strict rules and semantics but in the end if you are meticulous it should work exactly as it is supposed to do. See that guy there? He is agonizing over every character in a long senseless (?) string of them to get his software to work the first time and every time. He's no doubt a smart guy but still things don't always come out acting the way it said in the documentation. It's as if there is an intelligence at work among that code. You can play with it and alter layouts and somehow things change. I have had times where I did everything right and "it" refused to do what I coded. Next day as if by magic "it" decides OK I'll play nice and it works fine. Often you go back and forth adjusting a page many ties when you're struggling, creating epub file after epub file, editing, testing and so on. There are variables that effect things that you don't know about- you can't know about- you shouldn't know about. At first I thought it was just me. I'm new, self taught (with the help of many out there, thank you all) , I must have missed something. Then I came across this image on the web the other day. Yeah, it might not be me after all! There's just something unexplainable about this stuff! But if that's the case then we're back to that artificial intelligence thing again! Is there some digital universe where this stuff lives and thinks and schemes or dreams? Hmmm
It makes it a more interesting pursuit if things are unpredictable and fluid. There is more of a sense of magic and adventure. That has to be one of the reasons I love what I term "E-pubbin." It's also about making books which is magical too. Books can be eternal if they're preserved. If you think about it E-books don't have a physical presence so they aren't as delicate as paper and they should last until humankind has lost the ability to view digital files. It should be so much easier to keep an e-book in circulation forever and available to anyone with a connection. No need for thermal/humidity controlled archives, white gloves and viewing rooms. You know, there is a lot to think about e-books and 'What the...?'
It makes it a more interesting pursuit if things are unpredictable and fluid. There is more of a sense of magic and adventure. That has to be one of the reasons I love what I term "E-pubbin." It's also about making books which is magical too. Books can be eternal if they're preserved. If you think about it E-books don't have a physical presence so they aren't as delicate as paper and they should last until humankind has lost the ability to view digital files. It should be so much easier to keep an e-book in circulation forever and available to anyone with a connection. No need for thermal/humidity controlled archives, white gloves and viewing rooms. You know, there is a lot to think about e-books and 'What the...?'
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