[cc-community] looking for an application to display books online

Gavin Baker gavin at gavinbaker.com
Thu Sep 6 10:14:26 EDT 2007


-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Alek Tarkowski wrote:
> [...] Project Gutenberg has a very slow, 
> it seems - though effective - process of transforming text into other 
> formats (mainly HTML... I don't think they do PDF, which requires more 
> serious formatting and typesetting of text to make it well readable). 
> But they still display it in a quite basic way.
> 
> [...] we need better mechanisms for displaying plain text 
> / HTML than what Project Gutenberg does, in my opinion.

Project Gutenberg has a well-established process for producing books in
plain text, and more recently they provide HTML versions for many of the
books they produce. A goal of the project is to provide texts in
well-established, open formats that are likely to be supported for a
long time. Focusing on TXT and HTML also ensures the books are
accessible for people with low-powered computers (including handhelds,
mobiles, subnotebooks), with slow Internet connections, with physical
disabilities, etc. It also keeps storage requirements low, making it
possible to store more books on the same physical media (e.g. CD) for
distribution offline.

These are all very useful goals, I think. Any project that aims to scan
and OCR books -- which is the case if you can't use the images of the
scans -- should really take a page from Project Gutenberg and plan to do
things in the same way. Unless these books are already available online
(and if so, why are you scanning them :) then you should ensure to
preserve them by producing a "plain vanilla" TXT or HTML version.

If you *also* want a fancier display method for the book, just add this
on to the end of the Project Gutenberg workflow. Once you have a TXT or
HTML version of the book, you can use XHTML and CSS to style it however
you want. It doesn't take any special application to display books in a
pleasant-looking fashion, just a good designer. If you would prefer
PDFs, make a style template in OpenOffice.org and export to PDF. Other
than this, I'm not clear what you're looking for...
- --
Gavin Baker
http://www.gavinbaker.com/
gavin at gavinbaker.com
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iD8DBQFG4AtCtLXQdLhFpekRAtezAJ4qPf0DeZxka8WzlYn9wc71mU8DfACePS2g
/fAKlAaD6zMffqFssV1tlEs=
=Zhvu
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----


More information about the cc-community mailing list