[Bookreader] Epub and Read

[Sayamindu Dasgupta]

Hi all,
I have been working on getting Epub support into Read, and here is the
first screenshot:
http://dev.laptop.org/~sayamindu/screenshot_read_epub.png

It is not based on Evince, but on webkit (I had tried to implement a
backend for Evince, but lack of well defined pagination in many
(most??) Epub files, along with the relative difficulty of rendering
HTML for evince (with things like text selection/search support)
forced me to choose the alternative path). I'm trying to make the epub
view widget follow the evince api as closely as possible, so that it
can be dropped into Read with minimal effort/changes.

There is no public code yet - but there will be one soon (probably
during next week).

In a somewhat related note, I have been also looking at the draft Open
Publication Distribution System specs[1], which allows ebook
distributors to distribute e-books via a Atom XML based catalog
format. I think it makes sense to support this in Read, as well as in
the school server, so that we can easily distribute e-books. For
example, if we have a large e-book collection for a particular
deployment, it may not make sense to put all of them in individual
computers - instead allowing the user to browse/search the catalog and
download the books as and when required would probably be a better
option.

Thanks,
Sayamindu

[1] http://code.google.com/p/openpub/wiki/OPDS
-- 
Sayamindu Dasgupta
[http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings]