Book Server

Internet Archive EBook Platform

http://www.archive.org/bookserver

Feb'2010 audio presentation by Brewster Kahle.

Sept'2010 audio interview with Peter Brantley.

relationship to Open Library?


My term for a WebApp or WebSite that brings the Book to the Web

These notes started Sept23'2010.

Context/goals/complaints:

Summary: every book needs to be part of the World Wide Web. Books In Browsers!

  • I'm concentrating at the moment on in-print commercial titles. And current works where the EBook is really just a digital equivalent of the Printed Book.

Product/feature list:

Other features

Features to leave out(?)

Hmm, did I just re-design a subset of the Open Hyperdocument System?

Possible BusinessModels - I want to make this!

Start Up to build and sell to multiple publishers (Book Publishing Enterprise)

  • sell to publishers (Enterprise) who self-host.
  • sell hardware appliance that they hold but you control - when contract ends they keep the box and that version of software
  • host centrally as White Label ASP
  • for anything not hosted centrally, do you run into issues if you use any Open Source software (e.g. your WebApp Framework, Search Engine, etc.)? I haven't tracked the reality here.

Become an employee/contractor of a single publisher, build it just for them.

  • a University publisher might make sense

Become an employee/contractor of a Non-Profit (hello Internet Archive!), build it Open Source. (See top of this page, I'm not sure how my ideas intersect with Internet Archive Book Server project.)

  • do this as a University project? With students as developers? Sometime I should share my Thinking Tools Lab idea...

Become employee/contractor of online Book Store, build it just for them.

Become an online Book Store. Live off the same margins as Amazon and ITunes but at 1 zillionth the volume.

Variant of the above: focus on Self Publishing market. ASP service for authors to run their Author Platform.

Other ideas?

Conversion process

Make X/HTML plus images. (With EPub as starting point, this is easy.) Review next to PDF, edit HTML as necessary for style.

Create thumbnail versions of images if don't have them already. (EPub doesn't seem to support the idea of having a thumbnail that links to a separate full-sized Pop Up.)

Edit HTML where images are calls to use Thumb Nail and Pop Up. (Maybe some image-file-naming standards plus JavaScript can make this generic? Hmm does JQuery have something for that?)

Create Table Of Contents if necessary (chapter/section).

Make separate HTML file for each chapter (if not there already).

  • review sizes of chapter files, split if desired (preferably along Section boundaries if available).
  • make sure every Section header has appropriate heading-level tagging plus a-name

Update Table Of Contents to link to chapters/sections.

Run code to insert Purple Number-s.

Handle standard headers, next/prev/up navigation, etc. (not sure what approach to take yet - render static or not?)

Run code to take original index and re-generate linking to every matching Purple Number?


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