e-books

Wow - I hit a nerve!

I'll outline my thoughts too (similar to Frank's - your ideas rock!). Please
note that some of this is wildly off topic. Tack on any thoughts you have
and I'll commit it to Wiki.

- There is a plethora* of formats for e-books out there, ranging from ascii
text, through Palmpilot DOC, iSilo, HTML, PDF, rocket eBook, plucker (what a
cool app that is, Michael), etc.

- e-book software might need to be more than just a text file viewer. Some
extras: 'bookshelf management', annotations, illustrations, audio
attachments...

- Some sort of client/server split is involved (as with Frank's vision)
- A web-based uber-library would be cool.

- A device may have its own renderer, or may have some reusable viewer
software, be it zcat * | less, an HTML reader, a pocket word processor, a
PDF viewer.

- Loading the device with ever increasing numbers of content plug ins isn't
fun.

So, here's my suggestion of some bits to work at - probably overkill:

- A viewer. I've spent much of the day poking at ggv and xpdf, because I
think PDF might make an interesting base. However, some (all?) of these
devices will have some sort of HTML viewing capacity, be it plucker, iSilo,
Avantgo... A port of plucker would be pretty interesting too. Any others?

- A client bookshelf manager. This could be as basic as a file manager, or
as complex as a custom app.

- A file format? (TGZ/AR of PDF/text/html, sound clips, prebuilt
annotations)?

- Synchronisation. I like the look of SyncML a lot, are there others (aside
from the wonky-but-working Palm sync?)

- Server software. (while this is off-topic, It occurs to me that some sort
of XML/XSLT arrangement, fed by plugins for various content types, and
outputting various types (PDF via FOP, HTML directly, other XSLT engine
plugins), would do the trick here).

- A web archive (or virtual archive, feeding from gutenberg, ibiblio etc.)

Mike-o-babble.

* "Jefe, do you know what a plethora is?" - El Guapo.

-- 
Michael Houghton  - proudly relinquishing human rights for the sake of MI5
mike.a.t.idle.org     (see http://www.fipr.org/rip and http://www.stand.org.uk/)