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Awesome, glad to hear that, indeed! :D
Yep. That's another really good reason that I'd love ePub support: I tend to download a batch of stories to a Dropbox folder that's only accessible by my devices. I'll then retrieve a handful of them to my devices in question over wi-fi, and can read offline.
Each device will sync my place in a story back to Dropbox, so if I start a story on one tablet, then later move to another tablet or my phone, the data hit is minimal: The reader checks to see if there's a bookmark, offers it to me, and pulls that point. Data cost at that point? 32 bytes, if I did it over my cellular data. :)
I really appreciate the love that's been shown so far in favor of ePub support.
For those tuning in later, or just wondering why I'm pushing for this so much, here's some answers:
Tablets and ebook readers have become much more popular over the last several years, with ease in portability of a computing device being much easier than lugging around a stack of papers. ePubs are a zip file with formatted pages inside that can convey a story with or without images, fonts, and overall formatting to make it easier for authors to share the love they've forged from their keyboard. When fed to a proper app that can read these files, of which there are plenty, or placed on a device that can read them directly, such as the Sony PRS-T2, Barnes & Noble's Nook series, and many others...
We get the luxury of turning pages with the press of a button or a simple tap on the display, instead of trying to drag up and down and trying to keep track of where things are when reading a story. We get that level of ease that a person flipping through a stack of images already gets everywhere, and it helps to make reading cool again.
There are already libraries (bits of script) out there for developers to use to add this functionality, and it would let us as a fandom provide reading material where libraries (book huts) are still struggling.
A limited subset of HTML would be nice, in my books, though I realize that means needing to scrub the submitted HTML to make sure that someone's not trying for a high score in cross site scripting attacks. BB-Code, provided that it's a robust option, would also be acceptable.
Alternately, I suppose that we could go the route of the Reddit Enhancement Suite: Reddit's comment system uses Markdown, as does many sites. RES is a browser-based add-on that gives convenient buttons for markup above the window, much like UserEcho does for the commenting system does here. I can highlight a block of text, poke a button, and not need to remember which symbol is needed to bold, italicize, or underline text.
Customer support service by UserEcho
A vote for this, because as I mentioned before to the staff, I want authors to stop getting the shit end of the stick from communities and actually have better tools to work with. Let's see if we can get you some more attention so we can get this done. :)