I debated this post in my head for quite some time. Hereby I post it; the worst that can happen is I get sued.
Quite some time ago, I wrote this:
Once upon a time in eBookspace, there was a conversion house. “Ah! Open eBook Publication Structure!” said the people of this conversion house. “This is merely HTML in disguise.”
And they said, “Let us hire a great many robots at the lowest wages we can manage, build highly sophisticated production tools that even they cannot misuse (since robots, as we all know, are stupid creatures, prone to make mistakes), and turn them loose. We will not train our robots, since training is expensive and they need not understand what they are doing; they need only use the highly sophisticated tools in predictable fashion.
“We will not create high-quality OEB markup, moreover, since we will give our clients only the finished eBooks, not the markup that went into them—and in any case our clients are clueless about quality markup and we will do our best to see that they remain so. And yea, we will make a great deal of money and our days will be long on the earth.”
And they did as they had planned. And they failed miserably, and ended their days in great penury crying woefully unto the heavens about the injustice of their failure.
I got in heaping helpings of trouble (as in “a millimeter from being fired”) with my employer over this, because my employer thought—not without reason—that the company was being targeted. (And it was; I’d run out of internal places to try to push some kind of reform. But not uniquely targeted, not at all.)
I found out a bit ago that said employer ain’t in the conversion business no more. Now, while I’m not going to claim that the problems I pointed to are the only reason for their troubles in this arena, and I’m furthermore not going to claim that the company itself is imperiled (I don’t actually think it is)… I will claim that I was right about their mindset vis-à-vis conversion, and how much that mindset cost them in the long run.
My crystal ball is spotty, but every once in a while it turns up a winner.
