Although the size (and apparent markup complexity of your document might toss in a few hiccups, I’ve been having great success using a free ePub generator called Calibre. I convert everything to RTF before feeding it to Calibre (to, hopefully, strip out the worst Word/MS secpific garbage code). I do this because I hate all the default viewers for office documents on my droid, and the free epub reader I use makes reading long texts much easier!

Questions about “should I do this project” are less fun. Unless it’s something about which I have already thought “I wish someone would do X,” I would probably stay out of it–if you don’t feel strong enough about it to just do it, why should I try and talk you into it?

1. The previous post (on a possible OA book), something I really care about and consider potentially important, has received one comment to date. This relatively trivial rant has received a bunch…

2. Comments here have been mostly supportive (which, admittedly, is common for blog comments). The thread on FriendFeed…well, not so much.

Oh, by the way, I’m pretty sure my mother never said that. My parents were very strong on leading by example, and (as far as I can remember) very light on explicit advice of that sort. Maybe because I was the “bonus child,” nine years after my brother, five years after my sister? My sense, even from an early age, was that they trusted me to be at least moderately rational in decisions.

Let me chime in with those of us who respect you (and are also fans), and say (with a little humor), you are absolutely right!

In another life I often worked with teens, and I would use this statement: I never use absolutes. What does that do? Well, in addition to being a humorous oxymoron, it gets us to think about how we use the phrase “everybody does….” I want to know whose mother *never* said “Well, if everybody [or all your friends] jumped off a cliff, would you too?”

Thanks for helping to keep us both thinking and honest in what we say.

Case in point: I often get grief if I say something like “Why should I bother to write a well-researched blog post on [whatever] – NOBODY WILL READ IT!”. Now, I know very well that the number of readers will not be absolute zero. The statement really means something like “The number of readers will very very low, and thus the post will have an inconsequential effect which will not justify the time and energy involved”. So why don’t I say that? Because I think it loses some vital emotional tone of the former version, even if the latter is more accurate.

Basically, universalism CAN BE shorthand or misleading or puffery, etc. But I think never using them is too constraining, per above.

Thank you for writing this.

People like Walt (and me) who find that off-putting were never going to buy an iPhone anyway, so Jobs doesn’t give a shit about us.

Eh. Maybe I’m just old, too.

(Disclaimers: I like Mac OS but use Windows because I can’t afford the money for a Mac or the time for a Linux machine. I do have an iPod, a friend gave me his old one and I like it so much I’d probably replace it if it broke.)