Quote:
Originally Posted by europas_ice
Does anyone know how much data those little gift certificate cards can hold?
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What I meant was, a gift certificate entitling the bearer to download the book from a website. This could simply be a printed card with the ISBN number, a GC serial number, and a PIN (usually the PIN is covered before sale so people won't have to worry about someone copying the GC serial number and the PIN in the store/convention stall/etc.)
If you're asking about the magnetic stripe on the gift certificate cards sold by bookstore and other retail chains, I don't know. I'm no expert in this area, but a fairly casual Google search turned up a page that described the storage capabilities of
one kind of magnetic stripe card as 2-16k. That wouldn't be enough for most books, though it would cover most short stories, at least in text or other low-overhead formats (low-markup HTML, possibly). I don't think even the most optimistic text compression would get a minimally formatted novel into that size file. Then there's the problem that most people don't have magnetic stripe readers at home in any case.
According to
this source, QR codes can hold a maximum of 4296 characters (about 4k). With compression, that might be able to contain a short story with very minimal formatting. Maybe you could put a bunch of them on one page, one for each chapter of a book? You could add one for the OPF file that would bind them all together. You could fold the page with the QR codes in half, print the cover on the outside, and sell it as a book. No DRM, of course.
