Suggestion - Web site for PD Sony Reader Books?

[NatCh]

Perhaps a separate thread or forum for that specific purpose? We've already got something along those lines here, but perhaps it could do with some adjustment/refinement ....

[HarryT]

You're right, of course, Nat, but I see that more as a discussion of the "generalities" of discussing eBook creation tools and techniques (as, to a certain extent, is the "Reader Contents" sub-forum here. The advantages of being able to start a forum thread and attach a book to it are that:

1. It gives people a specific place to look for (hopefully) nice books to download.
2. It lets people see what other people are doing with book creation tools for the Reader (ie the "end results", rather than an abstract discussion of the tools).
3. It provides a focal point to ask questions about how that specific book was created or, indeed, a place for the creator of that book to ask other people how they feel it should be have been done.

It may sound silly, but I'm actually quite excited about this. BD has really given me the "Book Creation Bug" and I can think of all sorts of fun and interesting things I'd like to use BD for. A dedicated "Book Uploads" sub-forum could really be a focal point for people who want to create books to learn from each other and advance the "state of the art" in Reader book creation.

[sic]

Shouldn't SONY sponsor this?
from time to time I check prslabs.com that was mentioned on MR before as an upcoming content creation site by SONY... there's nothing there yet...
I guess I'm just daydreaming... ;-)

[NatCh]

Ah, I think I see better what you're getting at HarryT. (and just so it's clear, I wasn't trying to dismiss your idea before, just trying to explore ways to work with it )

That would be a bit more complicated than what I thought you were thinking of. I think you're right, the challenge is to organize it so that the books are easily found, but also so that the discussion could continue ...

-- thinking (mind the heatwave ) --

... maybe the books could be posted under their titles (brutally obvious, I know) but that particular part of the forum could be set up to also also be sortable by the book title (tread title), as well as the standard, "most recent post" approach. That would allow discussion to carry on like it currently does in the rest of MobileRead, but also allow looking for a particular book when that's what was wanted.

[sartori]

I like NatCh's idea of posting books by their title.

How about a standard way to start a thread i.e.

Dickens, Charles - Bleak House (Ver. 1 - 26 Mar 07)

That way people can discuss each book and also point out typos and formatting errors and the original creator could then update the version number and creation date so you always know if you have the most current version.

Any thread that is started without this format could be modified by the admins or moved to an appropriate forum.

Sartori

Just though of another idea - how about some sub-forums for User Requests and Work In Progress so that way we don't end up with multiple people working on the same books.

[LaughingVulcan]

I like the idea of a subfora that has nothing but posted book threads, attaching the book to the first post of that book's thread (or right below the Title...) and then the rest of the thread for discussion of the contents or the formatting. I think (if I understood correctly,) "what NatCh said..." especially regarding how the thread title should read.

Maybe requests for books could be a single pinned thread at the top? (But IMVHO it wouldn't be necessary.) Or *gurgle* a subforum of the book forum....
At any rate, I wouldn't mind sharing what I've developed so far. Especially if it results in being able to get other texts without a guilty conscience.

As far as legalities and copyright go, would Project Gutenberg eBooks be post-able after having been converted into .lrf? (I confess to having done so for my own use, and couldn't tell even though I tried to read through the fine print. Maybe I should go back and read it again, s..l..o..w..l..y... )

[NatCh]

All the PG stuff is public domain (wouldn't be in PG if it weren't ), so it's fair game.

[ath]

Originally Posted by NatCh

All the PG stuff is public domain (wouldn't be in PG if it weren't )

But PG isn't public domain everywhere. PG is PD in the US. There are PG titles that are still under copyright in the EU. And there are PG (Australia) titles that are not PD in the US.

[ath]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Does anyone know if such a web site exists or, if not, does anyone have the resources available to set up and manage such a site?

There seems to be two things here: discussion and availability. The discussion bit seems the easy part: it can be done anywhere.

There are many archives that could be used for actual uploads: http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/ has a section or archives of various sorts. One of the more interesting is, I suspect, www.archive.org. Smaller, special-interest sites (such as www.eserver.org) could also be possible sites.

[Hadrien]

Originally Posted by sic

I don't think feedbooks is going this direction.
They're generating the SONY Reader format from text source using LATEX and what not...
I also don't think that a forum is the best way to do it, because it will always promote the latest and not the greatest
I have a lot of diskspace on my webhosting service.
If someone would point me to the right Drupal module or similar php stuff to use I'd be glad to set up something...

Yes they're generated through LaTeX but we do support advanced formatting like table of contents (that's automatic) and stuff like real footnotes (using a code similar to bbcode: [footnote]Your footnote[/footnote]).

We believe that such a semantic representation of a book is more flexible: this way we can output anything out of this representation. We're still deep into beta, mostly working on the e-newspaper feature right now, but our goal in the future is to provide a completely flexible way to generate e-books using templates/skins.

There's too much time spent on converting to a single format, since we'll have this e-babel problem on our hands for some time, using xml/database to store books and then generate the right format out of it seems like the best solution for the future.

[shawn]

I don't have anything to add, I just wanted to say that I love the feedbooks site and I think a forum would be great. I actually spent some time looking for a forum on the site before realising there wasn't one.

[Stingo]

I'm curious. Why do you like the Feedbook site? All of the books are PDF. You can get the same and a wider collection of the same books in formatted in lrf for the Sony on manybooks.net. I personally stay away from PDF as much as possible since I like the flexibility of switching fonts in certain lighting conditions.

Not trying to be argumentative, just seeing if I am missing any advantages.

[NatCh]

Originally Posted by ath

But PG isn't public domain everywhere. PG is PD in the US. There are PG titles that are still under copyright in the EU. And there are PG (Australia) titles that are not PD in the US.

Hmm. Good point. I guess we should probably consider what is officially PD in the country where the MR servers are physically located....

[shawn]

stingo, I never heard of manybooks hehe thanks for letting me know! I'm a newbie to ebooks

[Hadrien]

Originally Posted by Stingo

I'm curious. Why do you like the Feedbook site? All of the books are PDF. You can get the same and a wider collection of the same books in formatted in lrf for the Sony on manybooks.net. I personally stay away from PDF as much as possible since I like the flexibility of switching fonts in certain lighting conditions.

Not trying to be argumentative, just seeing if I am missing any advantages.

Well, maybe I shouldn't be the one answering since I'm the one behind Feedbooks...

Manybooks LRF convert a bunch of text to another bunch of text in another format. There's no real formatting involved. On Feedbooks, since the books are generated using LaTeX, you get a real formatting with hyphenation, good looking chapter headers, table of contents, real footnotes etc... A "man made" file could be formatted in a better way, but that's still much more advanced that what most websites provide. The books themselves are not PDF, any other format could be supported in the future if it's advanced enough to support what we can currently do with LaTeX+PDF.
Oh and you can't switch fonts on those LRF files that you're using, you can increase or decrease the font size. You can't do such a thing on a PDF file, but since we provide an easy way to generate a custom file with different fonts and font sizes, it's quite flexible too.
And Feedbooks isn't only about public domain books, anyone can publish their own works easily, and we're working on those newspapers made out of multiple RSS and widgets too.