Where did the specification ebook go?

[Walter Bright]

On 3/3/2012 9:25 PM, Jakob Ovrum wrote:
> There is a link to a file `dlangspec.mobi` on this page:
>
> http://dlang.org/spec.html
>
> The ebook link is dead. I tried building an ebook myself using the makefile, but
> to no avail; kindlegen encountered dozens of problems with the generated
> dlangspec.html.
>
> Anyway, spec.html is not even reachable through any links on the site as far as
> I can tell. Shouldn't "Language Reference" in the sidebar link to that page? It
> currently sends you to lex.html. "Library Reference" links to an (incomplete!)
> overview of Phobos; it's probably a good idea to have the two links behave the
> same, even if that means "Library Reference" linking to, say, /phobos/object.html.
>
> I see that there is also an ebook sold on Amazon linked from that page; not sure
> what I think about monetizing an open source site like that, even if the
> copyrights of contributors are technically yielded to Walter. I'm thinking there
> might be some good reason here, though.

Amazon's minimum price for an ebook is $.99 (after all, Amazon is entitled to 
make some money off of their system). The Digital Mars cut of this 
"monetization" works out to $.35 per copy. I can assure you that nobody is 
getting rich off of that.

But if that still offends anyone, that's why it is linked to on the web site. It 
seems to have suffered bit rot in the transfer of the site to dlang.org, and 
simply having a number of people working on the text. It needs fixing.

I have attempted to donate it to the local government library, but they ignore 
my repeated emails and phone messages (I suspect that nobody actually works there).

I attempted to add it to Amazon's free lending library, but Amazon refused it 
because the book is not exclusive to Amazon.


> By the way, why does the makefile look for \kindlegen\kindlegen by default? For
> one, those are Windows specific path separators, and shouldn't it look for just
> "kindlegen" in the PATH environment variable?

For these and other bit rot issues with the ebook, please add a pull request to 
github to fix them.