Woah, check out A magic formula for ebooks ! It’s from 2010! Does it make sense to revisit some of what we said?
Do you use any of these technologies now?
One of the reasons talkgroup is remarkable to me is how you prove yourself right after ten years. Even ten years ago, you were weighing accuracy and making-do-with-what’s-available (a scan of a hard copy of a book) against what you want as the ideal (the promise of a digital text, that you can read in a manner of your choosing, without needing special programs). I am half in awe that you struck the core of the matter right away, and half dismayed that I feel like after 10 years our society hasn’t really made forward progress on this question. lol. The .pdfs of books I’m looking at right now that are text-based (rather than being image scans of physical copies of the books) are formatted badly and riddled with errors that I assume are from the OCR / image-to-text conversion software. And the .pdfs of books where the pdf is a scan of a physical book is… well, it’s not text, so it’s not searchable, and it’s even farther from the markdown-formatted text you mentioned (for example) than the text-based pdfs of books.
WE’RE NOT DEAD YET LE’TS DO IT
I don’t agree with myself from 10 years ago on this. However, I don’t have something better to suggest right now. The best I can do off-the-cuff, flailing, now, is “curate stuff for your pod, and you decide who you trust, I guess,” which is super handwavy.
Okay, I guess I do agree with myself from 10 years ago sometimes lol
Sometimes, I like thinking of talkgroup as a brain slowly mulling things over. We can watch it happen over ten years. TEN YEARS. TEN YEARS IS A LONG TIME. So much has changed, and so much has stayed the same.