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.