On Tue, Nov 25, 2014 at 6:34 PM, Dominic McDevitt-Parks <mcdevitd(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
You have a good point, though. One of the differences
between Wikisource
and most other platforms is that it is actually richly formatted. It's kind
of a shame to strip all that formatting information out when extracting the
transcriptions. (Though many destinations wouldn't know what to do with
formatted text anyway.)
I think this is a crucial issue.
Many projects do give you the possibility to download a .txt, which is ok
for digital preservation, but I challenge anyone to actually read a book in
txt. :-)
I believe that accessibility is having good ebooks accessible and readable
on numerous devices.
IMHO, what Tpt has done with his EPUB tool is remarkable: a nice, quick
tool for generate fairly formatted ebooks, allow readers to actually read
an ebook on a Kindle or a Kobo (or a tablet). It also work both with Index
and ns0 books. The problem is that it's not perfectly formatted, of course,
and it's not integrate within MediaWiki.
When I put the link to the ebook converter directly in the Header template,
stats skyrocketed : in few weeks we had thousands of downloads. (see it
here:
http://wsexport.wmflabs.org/tool/stat.php)
<http://wsexport.wmflabs.org/tool/stat.php>
So, readibility is one big issue. We are here to be read.
Structured formats it's good for export, integration with different
libraries, standardisation, and so on. It's fundamental, I think, for the
development of the whole project. if we convince the WMF to put some
permanent staff time, many things could be achieved :-)
Aubrey
PS: the script it's bad, I warn you, bit that's what I come up so far. I
hope to improve it in the next weeks. If you can make it better, please do
:-)