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Originally Posted by msjohnson007
I looked, to no avail, for a way to simply contact Kovid directly to have my request put through, and I sympathize with being busy, which is why I would have found the funding to pay him for his effort.
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The best way to contact Kovid is by posting in this forum. He has been less active for the past week or two, and posted that his family dealt with miscellaneous minor health-related stuff:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=252348
But he should be back soon, and will hopefully notice this, and comment how he sees fit.
I agree with the general rise of Cloud Computing, the growth of Chromebooks as personal computers, the issue of focusing on cloud support is one to think seriously about, again.
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I do not have the capability to write code or run servers from my classroom. Most elementary teachers and students do not and, its quite a task simply to monitor the students' online presence and activity. Many of our schools are still very limited in the technology that is allowed in the classroom. While the internet seems limitless, the minds and pockets of public school administration and PTAs are not even close. I have thought of a way to make it much easier. I am already reaching out to the local computer science departments in colleges and high schools for a Calibre-like program to be built and piloted in our district but I am unfamiliar with what such things require. I look forward to not only your continued constructive criticism but also your much savvier suggestions on how to proceed, should I have the capabilities in the near future.
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Well, all you would need to do is run the content server from one computer, say, your personal computer, and have the kids access the server it sets up. Servers really don't require any special capacity, other than software installed, unless you plan on serving millions (okay,
thousands) of people per day.
Although setting up a server often requires technical knowledge, in this case calibre does the work automatically.
If you can get a local high school/college class to organize a project for writing ebook software, it might be a good idea to see how amenable they are to the goal of contributing all-new functionality to calibre. Seriously.
The best way to guarantee the changes you want in an open-source project (like calibre) is always to bring working code to the developer. The developer may not have time to work on the code much, or may have time but a different focus, but developers are usually happy to merge other peoples' code if it works well. That is how the open source community thrives.
Have you enjoyed plugboards, and custom columns? MobileRead user @chaley saw the need for something like that, wrote it himself, and contributed it. Now it is one of the most useful advanced tools in calibre's arsenal, and many of us could not dream of a world where it didn't exist.
If you can get them interested, they will want to start by taking a look here:
http://manual.calibre-ebook.com/develop.html
They can also ask for help in the
Calibre Development subforum, Kovid is always happy to answer questions about the code, and offer guidance.
Kovid may also decide that it strikes his fancy to start working on this now himself, of course.
But he does have many things of interest to work on, so it isn't guaranteed. Either way, it cannot hurt to get your local computer science students interested.