Feedbooks.com: Beta released

[Hadrien]

Originally Posted by Strether

Hadrien, excuse my ignorance. I think I changed both the size and font on the download, but I'm not sure. Is there a way of looking at the downloaded PDF file on the desktop and finding out what the font name and size are? Looked under Properties, but it's not there. Am used to dealing with Word, which always displays both prominently.

Not really. Once you're logged in on Feedbooks, you'll see a link for Custom PDF in the upper right. Click on this one, then click on Sony in the template section right under "Custom PDF setting". What you're trying to change is the size of the font, so what you need to change is "Fontsize" and "Linespacing" (increasing these values I guess).
You can't do this directly on the reader because this is not how PDF work, but this way you'll get something much more suited for your own taste and once you've found the right settings, you can just click on "Custom PDF" for any book and it'll generate your own customized version.

[splat]

What is the possibility of getting Sony Librie as an output format?

[Hadrien]

Originally Posted by splat

What is the possibility of getting Sony Librie as an output format?

No support for LaTeX -> LRS/LRF so we won't support it for the moment. We'll expand our support after the beta since we're using a database to make this kind of operation easier, but we'll add support for the formats that LaTeX can generate first.

Edit: Hmm on the librie it's just pure XML right ? Might be possible to do something right after the beta then, XML is really easy to generate !

[Hadrien]

Updates:

- We've started working on more advanced user features. Added support for Gravatar (one avatar for every website instead of uploading avatar everywhere) and we'll support OpenID later in the beta.
- You can filter the books of an author using different ways now (popularity, type, name, year, language). Much easier to find what you're looking for.
- Still removing bugs from the PDF files generated.
- Full support for tags (looks like bbcode, but we're using our own set of tags). Use [ b ][ /b ] for bolds, [ i ][ /i ] for italics, [ quote ][ /quote ] for quotes etc.. (remove the blank spaces in the tags, I had to had them for the forum)

Soon:

- We'll be opening the News part really soon. A simple RSS -> PDF will be available first with the same options than the book generation (templates for A4, Sony & iLiad but you can customize it too).
- More advanced support for the News section is almost ready: creating a newspaper with multiple feeds for example + sudokus for those of you using an iLiad or who wants to print the PDF. We'll start the beta testing for these features after a few weeks of beta testing for the RSS -> PDF feature.

Edit: Added an example. This is TechCrunch RSS feed generated with the code we have right now.

[BACbKA]

Howdy Hadrien.

I tried to d/l a couple of originally-project-Gutenberg books from your site and noticed that they'd benefit a lot from postprocessing by e.g., the GutenMark script -- otherwise, you have things like "Mr." and "Mrs." treated as last words in a sentence, en-dashes where em-dashes should have been, emphasized words via all-capitals, irritating right-double-quotes instead of both left and right ones, etc.

Otherwise, your site is great. I especially like the customization feature, allowing one to select their own typeface/size.

[Hadrien]

Originally Posted by BACbKA

Howdy Hadrien.

I tried to d/l a couple of originally-project-Gutenberg books from your site and noticed that they'd benefit a lot from postprocessing by e.g., the GutenMark script -- otherwise, you have things like "Mr." and "Mrs." treated as last words in a sentence, en-dashes where em-dashes should have been, emphasized words via all-capitals, irritating right-double-quotes instead of both left and right ones, etc.

Otherwise, your site is great. I especially like the customization feature, allowing one to select their own typeface/size.

Right now, all the text goes through flex before being formatted in PDF using LaTeX. Since all of this post-processing is independent from the text itself, we'll keep on improving this part of the formatting too.

I've been busy improving the support for RSS feeds lately (and also working on a tool that will autosync these feeds/newspapers to your reader), and adding more advanced features on the website itself (we're logging what users download now in order to provide advices, something similar to what Amazon provides). But we're going to work on improving the formatting too in the upcoming weeks. I'll do a new template today for the iLiad users and post it both here and in the official iRex forum, this way, people can vote for the best suited font.

[Hadrien]

New recommendation system: http://blog.feedbooks.com/articles/2...ndation-system

"With hundreds of books available (and thousands in a few months), we needed some kind of recommendation system. The “Top Books” page may be helpful for those of you looking for the most popular titles, but we really wanted something much more advanced that would guide you in your readings. Our new recommendation system comes in 2 different flavors:"

"This is a new element that we added on the index of the website. Random books in our “Featured Books” list are displayed here. Pretty basic stuff but we thought that some kind of editorial advice would be cool (for example for fantastic yet not really popular books). "

"On every book’s page, you’ll find this new element on the right of the page. We log what people download during a single session on the website and display in this block the results. This will become more and more accurate as people download additional books."

[Hadrien]

We've been working on the full newspaper option and some of the items included in it. Sudoku is almost ready, with 5 levels of difficulty and the ability to display the solution. Should be online really soon.

For the newspaper, we'll provide an easy way for everyone to create an application that is able to download those newspapers, and sync them with a device, or anything of that sort. We're also working on such an application for the Sony PRS-500 right now and we'd like to do the same sort of thing for the iLiad, but directly on the iLiad itself. This way you could get your newspaper/rss/sudoku directly using the wifi connection of the iLiad. In the meantime I've been using kovidgoyal's libprs500 and wget to create the same thing. Here's my .bat file:

wget -O Techcrunch.pdf http://www.feedbooks.com/news/rss2pdf/3?format=sony
wget -O Slashdot.pdf http://www.feedbooks.com/news/rss2pdf/5?format=sony
prs500 rm /Data/media/books/Techcrunch.pdf
prs500 rm /Data/media/books/Slashdot.pdf
prs500 cp Techcrunch.pdf prs500:/Data/media/books
prs500 cp Slashdot.pdf prs500:/Data/media/books

Our "news stand" feature will work in a simple way. A GET or POST method on a given URL, with the right login and the MD5 hash of the password. If the login/pass is OK, you get a single XML file, with the name and URL for each of your subscriptions. "Subscriptions" will be on the website itself, with the ability to subscribe to RSS feeds, your own newspapers made out of various items, and sudokus.
It'll be really easy for anyone to port or create an app for different devices and OS this way.

[Hadrien]

Sudoku works great on our development website. Here's a sample for you in this post for the iLiad, with 25 sudokus in it, 5 for each level of difficuly. It took less than 2s to generate this on the server, so speed shouldn't be much of an issue.

We have two separate ways to generate these: a sudoku page that'll generate sudokus only, or you can use the sudoku widgets when you create a newspapers. This example is a newspaper with 5 sudokus widgets in it, one for each and every level of difficulty.

It'll be nice to get directly those sudokus on the iLiad, once the "news stand" feature is ready.

[Hadrien]

First version of our sync program should be out pretty soon now. It'll work in a really simple way: login/password, select your device and everything else is done directly on the website with the subscribe feature...

[Hadrien]

We've enabled the possibility for members to create their own newspapers now: http://www.feedbooks.com/news/create

You can add multiple rss or sudoku items in your newspaper, this way you don't have to keep multiple files.

[Alexander Turcic]

Originally Posted by Hadrien

You can add multiple rss or sudoku items in your newspaper, this way you don't have to keep multiple files.

Very nice, Hadrien! And I like the ajaxy feel of Feedbooks.

[Hadrien]

Originally Posted by Alexander Turcic

Very nice, Hadrien! And I like the ajaxy feel of Feedbooks.

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.

[Hadrien]

We're doing some extra work on the UI right now: we've just added tabs, and we're working on new pages, a better search feature and a real user control panel.

[Hadrien]

New Screencast: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhQYo4yQ_QA
Blog entry: http://blog.feedbooks.com/?p=13

It's about using a blog + Feedbooks to publish your own work.

If you’d like to publish a book this way:

1. Create a generic blog (using Blogger)
2. Publish the chapters on the blog
3. Copy the URI of the RSS Feed and paste it on the News Section of Feedbooks
4. Add a link to your file on the blog
5. (Optional) If you want to have the book both in reverse and correct order, you can use Yahoo Pipes. Create a new pipe with your RSS feed in the “Fetch Feed” element, connect it to a “Sort” element (it’s in Operators) and sort your feed by item.pubdate. Once it’s connected to the output, you can use the RSS output for this pipe on Feedbooks and add another link on your blog.

This is a pretty basic way to generate files for your own book. We’re already working on more advanced formatting and features, using our own XML format. We’ll create a custom version of a popular blog (Wordpress or Dotclear I guess) for this and open our API too. If you’re already publishing your own book using your blog or your website, and would like to beta-test this feature, send me an email at hadrien.gardeur [at] feedbooks.com .

PS: Pour une version française de la vidéo c’est ici: http://www.dailymotion.com/Feedbooks.../video/3755944