e-Book reader

[Ian Bicking]

(would this discussion be better on the Sugar list?)

Yoric wrote:
>>> Once the book has been downloaded locally or, say, added to a
>>> hypothetical peer-to-peer library, do you refer to it with the same http
>>> URL or with a file URL (respectively a peer-2-peer protocol URL) ?
>> The same URL.  That's the whole point of URLs!  The hypothetical
>> peer-to-peer library is just a fancy type of web cache: resources
>> which live canonically at (say) http://cscott.net can actually be
>> obtained from my neighbor (say) or the schoolserver.  But this is done
>> via the standard http proxying and caching mechanisms.  We *could*
>> return (say) a special http header which indicates that this resource
>> is peer-to-peer cachable, but I'd prefer not: 
> 
> Assuming that I've built a book myself or received that book from the SD
> slot, how are you going to tell your proxy server about it ? How should
> the proxy server know the original URL of the book ? Aren't you going to
> end up needing to upload/install that book + yet more meat-information
> to the proxy ? 

We're going to need some way to pass that information around with files. 
  I'm hoping the Journal will automatically keep track of this sort of 
thing...?  I'm not sure.

If we want to load up these persistent browser caches using a non-HTTP 
connection (e.g., carrying them around on USB drives), then we'll need a 
file or archive format for that, something that includes both metadata 
like location, ETag, content-type, etc., and the actual file bodies.


-- 
Ian Bicking : ianb at colorstudy.com : http://blog.ianbicking.org
             : Write code, do good : http://topp.openplans.org/careers