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Originally Posted by Kosst Amojan
Categories are crucial, it shouldn't be that hard to create a dozen or so standard categories for users to tag their stories with. If this "Books for Mobile Devices" site grows like we hope it will, people aren't going to want to waste time scrolling though romance stories to get to sci-fi for instance.
A few more questions. Why LaTeX? If this is for books and stories and not academic papers why is it needed? (I know a bit about it but not that much). Also will users be able to download entire books, not just chapter by chapter. That's what I'm most aperhensive about, these files are custom and chances are many of them will be unique to your site. How do you archive them in a non-propriority format? If the software you're using to save them is no longer upgraded what happens to the files? I've just had several problems with my companies website in the past, they posted articles to the site that went into the database. When we wanted to upgrade the site, it turns out we couldn't export those articles and the software was no longer supported. (Copying and pasting hundreds of articles is not fun  )
BTW: are you designing this site from scratch or using a database program? If so which one? |
Categories wouldn't necessarily alway fit what everyone wants, that's the main problem with it. As long as people tag their content correctly, it is easy to find their books. If your book is tagged "science fiction" then you will be able to find it as long as you search for science fiction. And let's say that you tag it with "science fiction" and "hard science", then it'll be possible to find similar books this way, something that just a few categories couldn't possibly do.
I'm using LaTeX for these main reasons: it's pretty fast, great looking and can output a whole lot of file formats. Users will always download the whole book, and not chapters.
The books themselves are not saved using some special software that I won't be able to use in the near future, they're stored in a database, which means that I can output anything (for example I can dump books in XML too, which could be interesting if an XML based book format became popular and widely used).
And the whole thing is built from scratch using Ruby on Rails (powerfull web 2.0 framework) on a server running FreeBSD, Lighttpd and MySQL (opensource for all of these, just like LaTeX).