I’ve already done the design work in Word. To be a robust standard, ePub should be a carrier, just as PDF is. At this point, that’s clearly not the case. I don’t think the blog analogy works except for people who craft their own CSS from scratch…or maybe it does, since I’d guess that a very high percentage of WordPress bloggers (and an even higher percentage of Blogger bloggers) don’t do any direct editing of the scripts that run their blogs, *or need to.*

CSS isn’t programming, it’s a stylesheet. I’d argue that it’s not “exotic,” given that it’s CSS that is styling this blog–even these words as I type them.

If it’s CSS, that would imply to me that it would be easy enough to get a style from someone else and customize it for your own purposes, as you have for this blog. I like messing with CSS, so if it’s something I could advise you on. let me know.

If all you are saying is that it’s currently difficult for writers to produce an ePub document with no fuss, then I believe you. But if you are saying that people who want to produce ebooks that meet a reasonably high standard of design shouldn’t have to learn to tweak some CSS (or find a friend who can for them) I’d say that’s unrealistic, and doesn’t jibe with my experience using blogs.

As a writer, I shouldn’t have to be a programmer. (I was a programmer for five decades. Been there, done that, don’t much want to do it any more.) I can buy a highly sophisticated piece of software that handles the “computer stuff” so I can focus on writing–and, as a quondam book designer, on page and publication layout. That’s Word2007 (or its competitors).

I can generate a predictably high-quality PDF from a Word document–quickly and easily. No programming required.

If I can’t generate a similarly high-quality ePub from a Word document, quickly and easily, it’s little help to say “just go in and program your way out of it–after all, it’s just CSS plus XHTML.” Which is saying ePub is an exotic format that you need special skills to create–not precisely the best way to make a so-called standard popular.

A wholly unsuitable answer is to tell me that, as a writer, I should be creating my own CSS. Sorry, but that won’t fly. The ideal would be an ePub “printer driver” for Word (and OpenOffice and GDocs, I suppose) or an effective .doc-to-.epub (or .docx-to-.epub, but the loss in layout and typefitting quality in backconverting from .docx to .doc is, while real, not huge) converter.

Otherwise, in the absence of convincing evidence that ePub will yield substantially more sales (irrelevant for this $0 publication) than PDF–and, when I asked the question for a priced book, the apparent volume of increased sales was zero–there’s no reason to do ePub. Which is bad news for a supposed standard. (Yes, I’ve thought about tech standards a lot–heck, I wrote the book on technical standards in libraries back in the day.)