Newbie question about reading epubs online

[pittendrigh]

I was going to delete one post only which seemed obsolete because of the https://github.com/satorumurmur/bibi link I found.

I'm still working on my version. Perhaps a month away from something useful. The bibi software is almost entirely Javascript. I'm working (and almost finished) on a more old fashioned PHP/Sessions way to read an unzipped epub3 on the server, that displays TOC and chapters and pages so it appears much the same way as in Readium. But my way happens entirely on the server with no requirement for the user to install anything. They can surf right to an epub3 which is either the entire book or perhaps a subset of the entire book.

The compressed epub will be there too, so if they purchase the book (after freely viewing a subset of pages) they can then download the epub and view it in more traditional client-side ways.

This is important to me because the majority of my customers are fishermen or carpenter boat builders who don't have an ebook reader installed. Expecting them to jump that many hoops keeps them away from the PayPal button.

Once I get them hooked with the online ebook bait perhaps they will take that leap. I can provide links to Readium and what ever else.

I sell passwords to access otherwise hidden how-to-do-it boat building pages already. Since 2000 or so. I've been doing this for a long time. Reformatting my boat building pages as a fully compliant epub will improve my system.

Finally. My system returns the TOC and ebook pages content as the content of a DIV. Bibi's Javascript requires HTML HEAD and BODY tags, so with his system the only way to embed the epub output inside a global website layout, complete with navigation to other things, would be to use an IFRAME. That's not a showstopper. IFRAMEs are not as bad as some try to make them out to be.

But IFRAMEs do have their problems. I like the idea of an epub as the contents of a DIV.

[LadyKate]

Originally Posted by pittendrigh

RE> "the why part"

I am writing a book about boat building and fly fishing. It won't be profitable. Not much anyway. It's just a hobby I'm having fun with. I do NOT want to share royalties with a traditional paper technology book publisher or with Amazon or Apple. I want to make no money my own way. All by myself.

I have a website. I want to put my book on my website, in a way that looks and acts like a book. I'm a retired programmer with wide ranging skills. I think I can do this. I sell digital boat blueprints online so I already have my own web-based DRM system to work with. I've been selling digital blueprints since the late 1990s. Have a domain name that goes back to 1998. Readers cannot read the digital blueprints without buying a password.

I want my books to act the same way. Online. Available to any user on any device with any browser. If they want to download the epub and read it with Readium or Calibre they could do that too. I'm just widening the audience a bit. Overlays, now that I think about it, might not be all that hard either. They are defined and mapped in an XML file. And PHP does XPath nicely.

These discussions always help. I appreciate everybody's feedback.

If you are writing a book and "building" the book as well then you will already be "coding" the book in HTML. The css files, images and html should be made with both the abilities of a browser window and the abilities of a tablet ereader program or a kindle in mind (keep your audience as wide as possible).

I have converted many text documents into epubs and the first step has always been to create good, clean html. The main addition I need to keep in mind is using a way to insert page breaks at the desired chapters and other places (I tend to make a chapter or pagebreak class) and the size limitations of most reading devices (for the size of images).

I find if I enjoy what I'm reading, I tend to want to take it to my tablet so I can sit back and enjoy it away from my computer.