[Bookreader] Book reader and eBook distribution/hosting service

[Sayamindu Dasgupta]

On Thu, Jan 14, 2010 at 10:36 PM, Martin Langhoff
<martin.langhoff at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
>

Yes - right now you need to change the code, but I'm willing to
consider other ways as well. It does support multiple repositories
easily.

>  - 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...
>

Sounds reasonable. Only way would be to have some way to ensure that
the metadata gets mapped and added correctly by whatever that is
"importing" the books. Incidentally, Get Books supports scanning USB
drives as they are plugged into XOs/

>> 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...
>

Yes, with the difference that the search can be done remotely (without
having to have a local cache of the catalog) via OpenSearch.


Thanks,
Sayamindu


-- 
Sayamindu Dasgupta
[http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings]