I watched the interview on Charlie Rose, then poked around on Amazon today — format is HTML. BBEdit should work just fine, I can continue to do what I have been doing for publishing to my web site for years should I decide to participate. It looks to be an exciting concept, expecially considering the number of best seller books that people read once just to keep up with things. Save trees.
In the support fora (plural of forum) for would-be authors, it appears that there is still a widespread misunderstanding about the difference between word processors (and in particular upper case W Word as in Microsoft Word) and text editors. In one of those coincidences that seem to happen more often than I would like to think, the same topic has come up in a project where several individuals are collaborating on publishing documents. I recommended that we use plain text for all communications. One person got it, with the help of another person in the group, and has been saving all their PC Word documents as RTF. Although it is a markup language, it is fairly universal and a decent compromise. Apple’s TextEdit application that comes with Mac OS X handles that file type quite nicely.
At one point I had a scheme to boost the economy — enhance productivity — by totally banning word processing software. The idea was to focus on the meaning of the words being written, rather their appearance on a page. I worked long enough in computer support to appreciate the amount of time people spend struggling with software about things that probably don’t matter.
Now to the rant part. Maybe it is because I read Fahrenheit 451 at too young an age, but to me the name kindle brings an image of burning books…
