[Alexandria-list] alexandria and ebboks?

[atenrok]

Cathal, 


Cathal Mc Ginley wrote:
> 
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> Adding support for cataloguing e-books has been discussed before, but
> no real progress has been made on the topic.
> 
> As I've been saying a lot recently, adding e-book support directly to
> Alexandria is not going to happen soon - the code would need
> substantial redesign to support such a change.
> 
> However, substantial *new* design is happening independently of the
> main Alexandria project. I have allowed for the possibility of e-books
> in the design of Palatina (the not-even-remotely-ready-for-users
> Alexandria replacement). So any feedback you can give would be helpful
> in shaping the code which will eventually (i.e. months from now) be
> wrapped back into Alexandria. 
> 

I'm really happy to read this, especially realizing that you care about
potential user suggestions  before implementing the features. 


Cathal Mc Ginley wrote:
> 
> The properties you mention for e-books are:
>  * file path
> 

yes. And the main issue here is that the library manager application should
not try change the location of the file. You can allow yourself to rename
the file to some kind of comprehensive name (like author-year-isbn, or
whatever you come up with) but if the user has its files arranged into some
kind of catalog structure -- that should be intact. I emphasize that because
the author of calibe, mentioned above, decided that application should
organize the files for the user. 



>  * checksum
> 

this one, obviously should be used to keep track of duplicates and fixing
the database of the path to the file was changed outside out alexandria. 




> I can also immediately think of:
>  * file format (e.g. PRC, PDF, FB2...)
>  * file size
>  * URL (if the e-book is available online)
>  * DOI (Digital Object Identifier - akin to ISBN for electronic
>    documents)
> 

very nice, taking into account that tags, notes and rating is implemented in
alexandria, this pretty much makes the list complete. The suggestion here
would be to implement different icons for corresponding formats, so these
are easily identifiable in the list. Although, if you add the column
indicating the file format, then the icons are obsolete to my mind. 

Also here is the question, is the "genre" field useful or should user rely
on tags?



> Are there any other properties that would be particularly useful?
> Should the Alexandria GUI have any extra features or behaviour to
> support useful handling of electronic texts?
> 

when it comes to handling, these days linux pretty much has all the
applications needed to handle most of the formats available on the market.
In case there's no reader available -- there is always  a converter. Since
not all of these are defined in mime-types you probably should let the user
choose the corresponding reader for every file-format somewhere in the
preferences dialog. 

Possibility to rescan the library (the directory with ebooks) in case  the
user has added some new books. In case the new book is detected, it is
offered to be added to the database (ask the user to fill the record
information). There  should be way to initiate the "rescan" manually, as
well as schedule the interval for it.

I don't particularly care about the next one, but I suspect that some users
might request these later, so you might start thinking about that ahead of
time.

1. format convertors, perhaps you should think about interface to specify
those the same way as the readers.
2. support for various kinds of hardware ebook readers. Since you cant own
them all, I would suggest implementing a plugin interface and let somebody
else write corresponding plugins.

good luck,
and keep up a nice job


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