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lavetra
generic Florida
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html/css is much more limited (tabs not allowed!) for professional text layout, this is where ODF shines. Things like reflowing text is also possible if the odf reader chooses to ignore the page settings (or only use them as a hint ;)

ps. why are your blog entries not showing up on identi.ca anymore?

According to Henry Petroski’s “The Book on the Bookshelf”, the book as we know it is portrait because from an engineering standpoint, it is stronger to bind the book on its longer edge. It’s fascinating that something as simple as that has influenced how we perceive the form and format of the book for centuries, and how it’s influenced design of things like the Kindle, or Sony Reader – in a world whereby we need no longer be tied to a portrait format. That said, art and photography books have traditionally been more experimental, and have been produced with different sizes and book formats.

So, a question remains. Webkit is open-source. So is Gecko. ePub content is XML, XHTML/CSS. So why do so few e-readers re-use these rendering technologies that are freely available, instead of reinventing the wheel?

My understanding (after asking this very directly to implementers) is that using Webkit makes it tremendously harder to:

override default rendering (wrapping poetry or code, say, inside a tiny viewport)
allow users to customize 1000 tiny things about the typography of their ebooks (hint: I hate this)
add notes, annotations, and bookmarks

I only recently learned this, so I haven’t been able to do my own investigations to understand how much of these are concrete limitations rather than just not-trivial-to-dos.

I challenged the audience to question why books were traditionally portrait but not landscape, and how it’s influenced even the design of e-readers today

It was fascinating to watch the way in which the landscape Twitter Book challenged all sorts of assumptions inside O’Reilly (also, to a lesser extent, the squarish slide:ology).