some quick reactions to this:

http://www.baldurbjarnason.com/notes/end-of-ebook-dev/


baldur said:
>   A writer should be able to open up a Scrivener or Word document – 
>   one that has been thrown back and forth between the writer 
>   and the editor until both are satisfied – click on something like 
>   “Export to EPUB” and have a ready-made EPUB file that 
>   works everywhere.

there's no such thing as an .epub file that "works everywhere".
and there never will be!  that format is irreversibly fractured...

you can get that with a new format.  if you don't allow it to be
fragmented, which typically happens because of vendors who
"embrace, extend, and extinguish", for their greedy interests.


>   You can’t get reliable one-button publishing 
>   as long as these devices have any sort of marketshare.

bullshit.  you just need to have a smarter button.  that's all.

but it _is_ true that, with kf8, amazon has started down
a very bad path of fracturing its file-format, which is an even
_worse_ problem than having a badly-outdated file-format.


>   But that particular vision of the future will have to 
>   wait until Amazon stops supporting KF7-only devices.

no, you're wrong.


>   To accomplish this we only need to add a single one-time step 
>   to our one-button process: Write, click export, and pick a theme.

you know, some people have done work to make this happen.

do you really think you can just waltz in and _describe_it_ and
hope to grab some of the credit?  if you do, i have news for you.

which is not to say that this "theme" theme has any substance,
or is heading in the right direction, because that's not the case.
but that's probably what we should expect when an idea's being
borrowed by someone who doesn't truly understand it at its core.


>   What readers need is

readers need a lot more than you seem to think they need...

so it's a good thing your ideas don't serve as the ceiling here.


>   A capable, easy to use, design tool that 
>   delivers to multiple platforms is hard to create.

not if you know what you're doing, and what you need, it's not.


>   Of course, it’d be a lot easier to do if everybody 
>   in the ebook industry just settled on one format 
>   and, maybe, a couple of standard rendering engines.

wrong again.  even _two_ "rendering engines" is one too many.

-bowerbird