Feedbooks.com: Beta released

[Hadrien]

New Feature: Dedication

Very simple feature but quite fun: you can now add a dedication to one of our e-books and send it to a friend. Just finished a novel that you loved ? Send a dedicated version to a friend this way ;-)

[charged]

I apologize if this is a stupid question, but how do I add line breaks at the end of a sentence or paragraph? I have tried a few things but nothing seems to work. The formatting is correct when I enter it into the text box, but the PDF that is generated has all the lines mushed together.

EDIT: I finally figured it out. The code is "[ br ]". With the text I was testing on I needed 2 before anything showed up so it initially threw me for a loop.

Back to work....

[Hadrien]

Originally Posted by charged

I apologize if this is a stupid question, but how do I add line breaks at the end of a sentence or paragraph? I have tried a few things but nothing seems to work. The formatting is correct when I enter it into the text box, but the PDF that is generated has all the lines mushed together.

EDIT: I finally figured it out. The code is "[ br ]". With the text I was testing on I needed 2 before anything showed up so it initially threw me for a loop.

Back to work....

Yeah that's the right tag. We do indenting instead of line breaks for public domain books, and most text are full of line breaks so we remove them.

We need to change this on the second part of the website...

Actually, we're working on something new for the formatting and I think that in the future, the input will be some kind of extended XHTML (we need a few additional tags compared to XHTML).

[Hadrien]

New Search Feature

A new search feature is now online with major improvements:

• Results are in a single list now with the most relevant one first. This way if you’re looking for an author for example, you get the author first, not some of his books.
• You can filter the results based on the nature of the results (books/authors) or switch between the most relevant results and the most downloaded results.

You’ll notice that there’s 2 links for searching our website with Google, they act in a very different way compared to our search feature:

• “ Results on Google”: The basic Google search is useful if you’re looking for something in one of the page of our website, not strictly a book or an author. It could be a comment, the description of a book etc…
• “ Results on Google (PDF)”: The Google (PDF) link is useful for full text search. It’ll list only A4 PDFs as a result, but it can search inside those PDF files. If you’re looking for a quote for example, that’s the best way to search through our texts.

The only real problem with these links to Google is the fact that you have to wait for a few days before the content is listed, unlike our own search system.
With all these improvements, our search feature should be a lot easier and useful. You can also use this feature within your own browser with our search extensions. There’s a lot of advanced features with the search system, I’ll do a full post about the possibilities behind it later on the blog.

[Hadrien]

(En)List Now !

Another new feature for both the Discover & Share sections of the website. List is a really simple feature: any registered member can create a list with multiple books (and a nice name/description). Those lists will then appear on the page of each book/author listed, and a few random lists too on the index for the Discover section.

How can those lists be useful ? Well first of all, for series, that’s a great way to list the whole thing.
For example:

• The Oz Books
• Barsoom
• Les Rougon-Macquart

A list can only be based on a common subject. There’s already a list for books based on utopia/dystopia available.
Those lists could be a lot more personal: we could imagine lists based on what someone felt while reading, books from your childhood etc…


How can I create a list ?


Creating a list is fairly easy too. Just open the page of the book that you need to add and press “ Add to a list”.
If this is your first list, you’ll be redirected to the “Create a list” page. Just enter the name and description of your list and once you’re ready, the list will be created with your first item in the list.
If you’ve already created at least one list, you’ll get straight to a page where you can select an old list or create a new one.
Once you’ve added the book to your list, a simple click on description will allow you to change it. You can also reorder the items in your list using drag&drop or remove any element in the list.
You’ll see your list on the page of the book/author as soon as there’s 2+ elements in your list.
If you need to edit your list, just open the page for the list and click on “ Edit this list”.

[andym]

Hi Hadrien

Amazing site.

I've been having a problem though. I downloaded Pride and Prejudice, but it won't let me download anything else. Is there a daily limit or something?

Merci

[Hadrien]

Originally Posted by andym

Hi Hadrien

Amazing site.

I've been having a problem though. I downloaded Pride and Prejudice, but it won't let me download anything else. Is there a daily limit or something?

Merci

No daily limit at all. Did you had any error while trying to download something else ?

[andym]

Hi Hadrien

No error message. To tell you exactly what happened: I successfully downloaded the pdf with custom settings. I went back to try to adjust the settings but when I pressed download I was redirected to the home page. I've tried to or three other books, in both Safari and Camino, but the same thing happens each time.

[Hadrien]

Originally Posted by andym

Hi Hadrien

No error message. To tell you exactly what happened: I successfully downloaded the pdf with custom settings. I went back to try to adjust the settings but when I pressed download I was redirected to the home page. I've tried to or three other books, in both Safari and Camino, but the same thing happens each time.

Ok, may be a bug with the custom PDF link then (try the other options, it should work). What's your nickname on Feedbooks ?

[andym]

Originally Posted by Hadrien

Ok, may be a bug with the custom PDF link then (try the other options, it should work). What's your nickname on Feedbooks ?

Hadrien

I'm sorry I was going into Custom settings and pressing OK each time when (I now realise) all I needed to do was click on Custom pdf.

A couple of suggestions:

- it might make make sense to put a smaller version of the download graphic beside each of the download links;

- amending the custom settings should send you back to the previous page.

But apart from that it's brilliant. Merci beaucoup. I will have to learn about LaTex so I can upload as well as download.

[Hadrien]

Originally Posted by andym

Hadrien

I'm sorry I was going into Custom settings and pressing OK each time when (I now realise) all I needed to do was click on Custom pdf.

A couple of suggestions:

- it might make make sense to put a smaller version of the download graphic beside each of the download links;

- amending the custom settings should send you back to the previous page.

But apart from that it's brilliant. Merci beaucoup. I will have to learn about LaTex so I can upload as well as download.

OK.

I'll add a full help guide on the website soon.
You don't need to know LaTeX to upload books on Feedbooks. To add parts/chapters/sections you just need to click on a few buttons and the markup in the text will soon be XHTML (for basic formatting like bold, italics etc...) and a few extra tags (<footnote>, <quote>, <verse>...).

I'll create a full guide explaining how to upload books too.
There's a few reasons why uploading on Feedbooks can be even more helpful than uploading a handmade version:

• anyone can customize the PDF output for their own taste
• we'll be adding support for more formats (expect Epub support pretty soon), which means that you won't have to edit/publish a book again when a new format is needed
• metadata: we use metadatas the best that we can. It's easy to search for a book, browse through the books of an author using filters (most downloaded, year, type of book), create lists (http://www.feedbooks.com/list/view/6) etc...
• recommendation system: we try to identify similar books through download patterns. Suggestions are added on the page of a book, but also at the end of the e-book file. Personal recommendations is on the way: just add a few favorites, download some e-books and we'll create a recommendation list.

[flamaest]

Feedbooks is a revolutionary website!

When will this wonderful "sync program" be ready to use, I CAN'T WAIT !!

Thanks,
Fabian.

[flamaest]

Originally Posted by Hadrien

Yeah we're using prototype for this, it's included in Ruby on Rails. This way we can add/remove elements from the page, do drag & drop for the order of the elements in your newspaper etc... Much more simple for the user than plain HTML elements.

When using the drag & drop for the order of the elements in a newspaper, can you guys add the option of sorting alphabetically? I have like 50 RSS feeds in my newspaper and they are a pain to search and manage when not in alphabetical order.

Thanks,
F.

[flamaest]

Lovin' the feedbooks site!

Some feedbooks interface comments:

Sometimes when I select the "Sony Reader" type of PDF download, my browser will launch Acrobat instead of asking me where to store the PDF file. This happens about once every 15 downloads.

After I login, is there a way to select that I have a Sony Reader as my default device, so I don't have to select the PDF type when subscribing to an RSS feed?

After I add an RSS feed to my main newspaper page [not my newspaper], the interface doesn't seem to easily allow me to unsubscribe to a particular RSS feed unless I can get to it again from the top-10, and then select unsubscribe.

I think it would be helpful to allow the doanloding of an entire newspaper as individual RSS feed PDFs. It seem like your server is being heavily taxed when asking for an entire newspaper, the request fails most of the time, when the newspaper is big.



Thanks,
F.

[ricdiogo]

Hadrien where are you located? which copyright law do you follow?