[Bookreader] Book reader and eBook distribution/hosting service

[Martin Langhoff]

On Thu, Jan 14, 2010 at 5:12 PM, Sayamindu Dasgupta <sayamindu at gmail.com> wrote:
> Read does not support any book retrieval mechanism. But Get Books and
> Get Internet Archive Books do.

Ok - I'll have to playmore with Get Books :-) -- will it know to use
several possible repositories? For example, a large deployment wants
to ship its XOs precofnigured to look at

 - the local XS (likely to be there, and to be much faster, but won't
be there for city kids that have internet access outside of school)

 - one or more national/regional servers in the sky (slower than the
XS) -- these might just not be there for rural users that have no
internet access)

 - "universal" servers -- Internet Archive, etc

> Get Books support the OPDS standard,
> while Get Internet Books support a CSV format used by Internet Archive
> (the IA supports OPDS as well).

Ok. Will have to read a bit on OPDS.


> It depends on the format. If the books are EPUB, considerable amount
> of metadata can be easily retrieved, but for formats like DJVU, there
> may be no metadata at all.

I imagined that that'd be the case.

> I would probably prefer to stick to standard formats,

me too -

> 1. Have a specified directory on the file system which is crawled
> periodically via cron.

We need various points of entry,

 - A directory to upload ebooks into via Moodle - for teachers to
upload new ebooks that they may have downloaded or obtained via
sneakernet.

 - XS scans usb sticks that you plug in for certain directories -- and
if the content matches what the XS expects, then they are imported.
This works for activity bundles, etc. Adding support for an 'ebooks'
directory is easy.

 - The directory you describe -- only useful for schools that have a sysadmin...

> Does this sound sane ?

Sure does. I am assuming that the OPDS catalogs are a bit like a yum
or apt index that clients download and query locally...

cheers,


m
-- 
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 martin at laptop.org -- School Server Architect
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