[taggedzi]

Good stuff.

@carpetmojo: What would make it less "clunky" or more user friendly for you? I have tried a few things and due to the amount of data being displayed I haven't found a better way of doing it yet.

@Sigyn: The way the annotation works at present is, if you are signed in, you can add "notes" at the bottom of any page. The note stays on the site, and is directly associated with your user account. So if you log in from anywhere, any device you use can access your notes. In the future I am hoping to upgrade the functionality some as well, I would like to be able to collect your notes and search through them, (some sort of way to collect all your note onto a page and maybe print them out? still forming the ideas on this...) but for now, it is a simple way to put a note on a page so you can remember some thing and come back to it. Suggestions are welcome if you have any ideas. Please remember this is a hobby and may take some time to do, but any good ideas I'd love to hear.

@kennyc: I agree with you, there is not a huge market for this type of site as it stands, as there are many other things capable of doing the job. I have no delusions of sweeping the ebook reader genre by storm or even getting a ton of users. (I realize I'm offering proverbial homemade bikes in a market where people want BMW's...) However, there is a market for people who want to read using things that are not typical ebook readers, I am one, and I know quite a few others.

I'm not trying to create a land slide of users, in fact I don't know if i could handle tens of thousands of users... at present I have about 200 users that come through regularly, and have about 100 registered users, based on the stats I have seen coming through.

There are sites like gutenburg that offer the vanilla texts, if you have tried to use it on a less capable device it is a nightmare. Some of the larger texts just crash smaller devices. (I know anything over about 500 pages crashes my DSi because it does not have the memory.) In short, I am hoping to offer some features that are not available anyplace else (yet). The browser based sites I have found, do not offer cross device abilities, and have very limited options... you can turn pages and have a single book mark on a single device as long as it supports cookies... (my dsi does not..)

I am offering a site that is compatible with a wider range of devices, than your standard app (I hope...). I can't get a kindle app on my DSi, or my cellphone (yes it is very old...) at least not yet.

As I'm not trying to get rich off of this (it would be nice to make a living...), the end goal is to allow people to read books for free, hopefully soon this will include new works that are not public domain... but as this is a hobby and I don't have a lawyer willing to volunteer time to help me overcome some of the legal options of allowing users or even authors to include new works. I have to make sure that the project does not get shut down over people uploading content that is in violation of copyright. (I am trying to figure out that process in between my job and family with limited resources.)

@anyone: I am a web programmer, and this project started as a desire to read children's books to my daughter. I realized there had to be other people like me, and started this as a full scale website... It has slowly grown and evolved, usually on nights and weekends. As I find things features and texts that I find interesting I add them. Please have no illusion this is not a large corporate production meant to bring in the masses... this is a simple site I hope to grow it into something useful and amazing, but it will take years (unless I manage to get independently wealthy and spontaneously get tons of time.) So if you find the site useful I am very happy, and if you don't that is ok too, I'm not looking to be everything to everyone... If you think of something that would be cool, a feature or a way to make things more usable please let me know... it may take me a while but if it is a good idea I'll try to incorporate it. (Realize as there is no money in this I cannot compensate for contributions... so make sure you are comfortable with that before you do..)

Thanks for the responses so far, I do appreciate them and if this site isn't for you it is ok. Any productive ideas on making it better or more useful are welcome.