On 06/07/2012 03:36 PM, Magnus Manske wrote:
On Thu, Jun 7, 2012 at 1:37 PM, Emmanuel Engelhart emmanuel@engelhart.org wrote:
Hi,
Gerardm has released within the last week two blog posts about our weakness to publish and advert ready-to-use offline "books":
http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.fr/2012/06/wmdevdays-finished-book-source-th...
I share his concern: we should IMO elaborate a plan/agenda to setup a publication platform (something like itunes for example)... and you?
Assuming that we can generate EPUB format -
Yes, they are a few tech. dev. we still have to do like: * EPUB generation * EPUB support in Kiwix * page by page support for Wikisource&Wikibooks * A lot of bug fixing... * ...
why not just put them for free on, say, Amazon, without DRM? That does not exclude other companies (although it does exclude Apple); if we get books on one of the big platforms, the rest will come to us as well. Others have built the distribution channels; why not use those?
I do not think we should use Amazon as primary publication platform because: * We create a strong dependency to Amazon * Amazon has a totally different Agenda as our, they are especially motivated by money and by selling their e-book reader "Kindle"... * You need to register to download anything, so you need to share your private data with amazon * You can not propose I guess to download files with the formats like ZIM or PDF * Not sure you may propose contents without ISBN
For now, I consider Amazon or the ThePirateBay (for other reasons) like good potential secondary publication platforms, but not a good solution for as a primary one. Maybe, they are other projects, I still ignore, which could better match our needs?
Emmanuel