Expansion of Book Uploads for the iLiad & for other devices

[Alexander Turcic]

With already over 350 carefully styled and handmade e-books for the Sony Reader, and brought to life less than 2-1/2 months ago, the Book Upload section has been a phenomenal success. My personal thanks to everyone who has been so fervently contributing up to today!

It's now about time to expand the uploads with formats for other e-book readers. Please take a second to participate in the poll which we will use as an indication how you'd like us to expand the forums. Thanks!

Hint: This is a multiple choice poll.

[Robert Marquard]

Books for the iLiad only make no sense. It would be Mobipocket format which is available for many devices.
What we definitely need is the HTML source for the handmade books already available. Ideally with projects to convert them to multiple formats.

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

I like the idea of multiple formats. Providing HTML source code is nice, but it alienates those who would love to have the books, but cannot/will not do the conversions themselves. Why not make multiple formats available?

[RWood]

As the Delphi-Guy said, iLiad uses mobi so if we added another forum for that format it would serve multiple devices. The same reasoning supports the addition of an area for PDB (which in itself can also be used by those that use mobi.)

It seems to me that HTML runs counter to the logic of offering books that people can just load and go. I can easily convert all that I have already uploaded to the Sony area to another format and make them available.

[nekokami]

I was assuming the iLiad formatted books would be PDF, I guess.

[wallcraft]

MOBI format is all I need, it can be read using MoibiPocket's Reader software on many devices and FBReader on Linux (and Windows XP). Another possibility would be LIT, since many folks will have a procedure for getting .lit files onto their reading device already.

[RWood]

Originally Posted by nekokami

I was assuming the iLiad formatted books would be PDF, I guess.

Assume nothing. (OK, it was a catch phrase from the film Desk Set.)

There is no reason that we cannot do custom PDFs for the iLiad. Feedbooks.com already does that and has many of the titles that are available in LRF format here at MobileRead for the Sony.

[NatCh]

Perhaps it'd be better to upload the books to FeedBooks for processing into Custom PDFs? Hadrien's put a lot of effort into that rascal, and I know we aren't out to steal any thunder.

Maybe we could then add a link to Feedbooks to point folks there for PDF formatted books, or some such?

[nekokami]

Yes, that probably would make more sense.

I was wondering why that wasn't the case for the Reader, as well, but I guess it's the custom LRF format.

[Alexander Turcic]

Originally Posted by NatCh

Perhaps it'd be better to upload the books to FeedBooks for processing into Custom PDFs? Hadrien's put a lot of effort into that rascal, and I know we aren't out to steal any thunder.

Maybe we could then add a link to Feedbooks to point folks there for PDF formatted books, or some such?

I think Feedbooks works very well as a complimentary source for e-books. Feedbooks has an automated backend that Hadrien is constantly improving, whereas for example the e-books that have already been uploaded for the Sony Reader here are very unique and custom-crafted. The advantage is that we can discuss and comment these uploads and constantly improve them.

So I would definitely favor to built upon what we've already created through the upload section for the Sony Reader.

[Hadrien]

Well... I guess that in some case, handmade books are quite different from what we provide with Feedbooks. But we're not doing a simple conversion like manybooks either. The goal of Feedbooks is to provide the best machine made formatting, and we'll be working on the same goal with XML-based formats too (we won't be able to do advanced typesetting but we'll focus on good looking chapter headings, TOCs, real footnotes etc...).

Feedbooks is basically a "black box" and we'll provide more outputs, and a more flexible input for it in the future.
Things we're working on:
- recommendation system: we're planning on doing personnal recommendations, based on what you have in your favorites
- synchronize: we're building a small app to synchronize our content for your e-ink device ( http://blog.feedbooks.com/?p=3 ). We would like to do an app directly on the iLiad too that would let you browse and download content using your iLiad (I can do C and GTK, but I'm still missing a development device, iRex people aren't answering at all)
- formats: better RSS support, the last few improvements that we need for PDF support, Open E-book support. Output isn't limited to e-book formats, we'll support e-mail and maybe mobile phone related features too. We already implemented Text To Speech with mp3 output, but weren't satisfied by the result of the open source software we were using (if we find the right TTS engine, we'll open this feature to the public).
- input: working on an XML format for input. This way you'll be able to use your blog and publish your own book on it (you post the chapter on your blogs, and with a plugin, it'll generate the right format for us to format everything and publish your book in all the different formats supported).
- news widgets: we'll add more and more widgets for the news part of the website. We'd like to create something else than just a PDF files with a bunch of RSS feeds in it, something closer to Netvibes and all these Ajax homepages, but for e-ink readers.
- social stuff: we're working on a Facebook application that'll show your favorite books on your profile. We'll do "dedicated e-books", you'll be able to add a small message in an e-book and send it to a friend.

Some of the users on this forum added books on Feedbooks, and yes, once someone added a book on Feedbooks, it's available for both the Sony PRS-500 and the iLiad (+ customized PDF too). We can't exactly cut and paste, or use a bot like most websites in order to build our database. We need to divide books into parts/chapters/sections and this can't be done without a bit of human work so help is appreciated.

[TadW]

I voted for adding both, a section for the iLiad in particular and a section for uploads in general formats. Why? Because for the reason mentioned by Steve Jordan. It's makes a huge difference whether you must download a text and first convert it, or whether you can download immediately and install it on your device with the perfect settings.

The Sony Reader uploads section rocks, and I cannot see why it shouldn't be the same for the other upload sections.

But... I have one suggestion:
On the frontpage, remove uploads from the "Latest Forum Activity" section. Instead add a new section specifically for latest e-book uploads. This way we can track both more easily, user threads and user uploads.

[yvanleterrible]

Since we're living in the shadow of EBabel, it would only be fair to allow multiple choices. Let's not forget expansion for the other formats that will be imposed on us too. And that format that will unite us all has not been born yet.

[imaredr]

Although I chose to provide books in different formats, I would love to contribute PD books for the Sony reader as well as other formats. Is there a consolidated tutorial for cleaning up the text? Sometimes I get unwanted or excess spaces, no space between words, or deleted special characters (like an accented "e" missing). All the books uploaded so far are so well done and I don't want to embarass myself.

Ellen

[UncleDuke]

almost everyone else that i know reads on a fancy palm