Why did you capitalize the entire first sentence instead of using the :first-line pseudo-class?

Just a geeky web design teacher wondering.

For the sake of clarity, please note that Peter’s complaint is that “eBooks bought from Amazon will be bound to Amazon.” A valid concern, certainly… but you then translate this into “all my books,” disregarding the many other sources of Kindle content available online that are NOT dependent on Amazon’s servers or services.

I have the same concerns about the Kindle, which is why I don’t own one. I hate to think what owning all my books through a company would mean for how I use them in the future. When someone makes an eReader as nice as the Kindle but free for me to do whatever I please with it, I’ll buy one. In the meantime, I’ll have to settle for reading eBooks in PDF form on my laptop…

However – I don’t want to dampen your enthusiasm… but is everybody aware that, in contrast to dead trees, eBooks bought from Amazon will be bound to Amazon – forever? I cannot load them to any other device except what Amazon offers me… this is not comparable to to original iTunes DRM situation, where there was always the (official) backdoor of burning CDs… personally, I will not accept this, not even when it is offered in Europe. Some of my “wooden” books here are older than 30 years, don’t depend on any company and I can do with them whatever I want.

DRM? publish through DTP and there is none.

The ‘thought break’ can also be accomplished by starting a standard p with a br. This gives you a blank line followed by no indent.

For the ‘height’ notations, it’s probably better to use em lengths rather than pixels. Then if the user changes the font size, the whitespace will remain proportional. And for title pages, I like to use percentage (height=”25%” to space down from the top of the ‘page.’

I’m not sure, but it might be the case that the css can support the ‘page-break-before: always’ tag. This would be a help if all your chapter titles are h2 – then you could just say all h2 headers have the page-break. But I’ve only coded using the mbp:pagebreak because that’s what Amazon is advising.

There’s also the ‘margin’ css attribute, which works on -top, -bottom, and -left, but not on -right.

Blockquote indents from the left but not the right.

For those bemoaning lack of Kindle in Europe, or Amazon DRM, or whatever, try to see the big picture here. There is a reason this product is named Kindle. It’s a prototype. Amazon is showing us the true potential, too long latent, of e-books when distribution is perfectly aligned with consumption. You will have one soon enough.

If Amazon has the right to ship dead trees, it should be able to arrange for the right to ship bits.

What am I doing? I am letting my voice heard, and I support initiatives here in Europe which tend to tear down intellectual rights cross national barriers. These efforts have led to the the recent push towards a unique iTunes Store across Europe.

But, and this is a big “but”, our European voices are not loud enough. The best thing to do would to get for some help from you American. If every time somebody publishes something [supportive] about the Kindle, s/he kindly reminds that the picture is darkened by this issue and requests some progress, then that would be the best pressure on Amazon.

If Amazon has the right to ship dead trees, it should be able to arrange for the right to ship bits.

What am I doing? I am letting my voice heard, and I support initiatives here in Europe which tend to tear down intellectual rights cross national barriers. These efforts have led to the the recent push towards a unique iTunes Store across Europe.

But, and this is a big “but”, our European voices are not loud enough. The best thing to do would to get for some help from you American. If every time somebody publishes something [supportive] about the Kindle, s/he kindly reminds that the picture is darkened by this issue and requests some progress, then that would be the best pressure on Amazon.