Okay, my curosity has gotten the better of me. On receiving notification of Shell and Slate's latest publication - two in depth game commentries btw I was interested to read:



sure I could have patience and see what turns up .. but does anyone know what they're talking about?

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I am John. John-I-Am.

Uhm, impatience can be contagious, so …

First of all, I think the thread title is misleading. To me it doesn’t seem to be an “e-book reader rumour”. Read on, please …

This is SmartGo Kifu for iPad (thanks @ Oren for reminding me to be precise ), a very nice Go app which I’ve already used quite often (iTunes link), with many features, including handling (creation, im-/export) of SGF files (showing comments, adding comments etc.)

This is Slate & Shell’s offering of “Deep Thought: Extremely Thorough Pro Game Commentaries” by Yuan Zhou as a compressed ZIP file, apparently with all comments within the SGF.

Seems as if these SGFs are coming to SmartGo Kifu, either (hopefully) for free with an update or perhaps (probably) as in-app purchase
________

The other thing, this talk about a cross-platform go program, is, for now and IMHO, just this: hearsay (not that I wouldn’t welcome such a program). And then they widen the definition of “ebook” to include SGF with game commentary, if I understand it correctly (not that I wouldn’t appreciate the distribution of commented games this way ).

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“The only difference between me and a madman is that I’m not mad.” — Salvador Dali ★ Play a slooooow correspondence game with me on OGS?

That doesn't seem to be the case, Bonobo. The quote says "cross-platform go playing program" which SmartGo Kifu definitely isn't.

Oren, please re-read my comment. BTW I’ve precised my sentence about SmartGo Kifu.

SmartGo Kifu I only mentioned because the first part of the text CnP quoted (very probably) was about the “Deep Thought …” coming to SmartGo Kifu, as I tried to explain. A misunderstanding could emerge from the fact that the quoted text seems to suddenly change subject and talk about a “cross platform Go playing program” … but then they go on telling that they’d continue distributing “in this more basic (but highly portable!) format” which I can only interpret as being SGF.

Did I make myself any clearer now?

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“The only difference between me and a madman is that I’m not mad.” — Salvador Dali ★ Play a slooooow correspondence game with me on OGS?

This doesn't answer the question though. What we really want to know is what Slate and Shell is hinting about for a cross platform solution.

At least we are one step further inasmuch as the rumour is not about an e-book reader but about a “cross platform go playing program”, no?

The other crap I wrote I gave as “added value”, bitteschön

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“The only difference between me and a madman is that I’m not mad.” — Salvador Dali ★ Play a slooooow correspondence game with me on OGS?

What I found curious is that I don't see how a cross-platform go playing "program" would help in any way with reading a book. There are plenty of cross-platform "go-playing programs". GNU Go, for example. So I think the issue is that the statement as written doesn't even make much sense.

The "go playing program" they're describing seems to be something like SmartGo Books, so maybe they should have said "We've heard rumors that SmartGo Books wills oon be available for multiple platforms",b ut that doesn't make sense either because they already said they're publishing soon on SGB, so if that were the meaning then the following phrase "but until then we'll continue to publish ebooks in this format." wouldn't make sense. And what advantage would such a program provide over SGB anyway?

Yeah, a cross platform alternative to SmartGo Books that was adopted by the publishers would be nice to see. Until then SGF or Kindle is as cross platform as we can get.

Since Smartgo books uses a modified version of SGF under the covers, one might well be able to modify an existing SGF client, rather than creating a completely novel reader.

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Occupy Babel!

I realised the title might be interpreted as a bit confusing (after posting it, sorry), however e-book reader just means someting for reading e-books to me (and I owned a dedicated e-book reader device). So yes what I understood it to be was (as with other S&S offerings) - they were selling it as commented sgf, would be selling it as a smartgo book soon and there might be something else later - a cross platform reader software, would love to read invincible on my android tablet..

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I am John. John-I-Am.

There is a pdf of Invincible out there which I read on my tablet.

I'd feel bad, but I own both softcover and hardcover, so downloading the pdf for tablet convenience seemed fine. I then gathered the sgf to play through any games in it.