Tag Archives: epub

Project Idea – Syncing ebook reader

The bookworm logo

Here’s the setup. O’Reilly hosts a django based open source ebook reading website called bookworm.  You can run bookworm on your own server.  I opened a ticket on bookworm’s bugtracker to provide an api method to update where you are in a book.  Next you update Aldiko (Not open source, but perhaps we can write a plugin for it) and FbreaderJ to use that method when they exit to update where you stopped reading.

Upshot: You open a book on your phone and read it.  It syncs with your server with a bookmark of where you stopped reading.  Then you go to your website, and begin reading from where you left off.  And so on. Perhaps your phone also detects when it gets a new ebook and uploads that to your server or downloads a new book from your server when one shows up as well.

Bringing Something to the Party

I just noticed that Paul Carr has released his new book, “Bringing Nothing to the Party: True Confessions of a New Media Whore” as a Creative Commons BY-NC  licensed download for the US. And the, um, rest of the internet.

I’m going to read it on my hot new Droid phone, but there’s only a PDF version and an HTML version. I want ePub format, so I converted it.  You can download the ePub version of “Bringing Nothing to the Party” here.

It looks like Paul has put a CC-BY-NC license in his blog post, but has put also ND in his text.  He’s also been thankful for a derivative work before, so I think he really means BY-NC.  Regardless, if he asks me to take down the ePub, I will.  You gotta make sure CC licenses actually match up with what you want.