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...

• http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.fr/2012/06/publishing-final-versions.html

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

On 06/07/2012 04:01 PM, Bastien Guerry wrote:

Emmanuel Engelhartemmanuel@engelhart.org writes:

...

http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.fr/2012/06/wmdevdays-finished-book-source-th...

• http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.fr/2012/06/publishing-final-versions.html

I share his concern: we should IMO elaborate a plan/agenda to setup a publication platform (something like itunes for example)... and you?

I do too.

I'm following another french public domain ebooks project:

http://www.ebooksgratuits.com

The leader of the project regularily sends announcements on the mailing list about finished books -- these announcements are my favorite readings as they contain small summaries, a list of contributors who accomplished the work, and other useful notes.

ebooksgratuits.com approach is IMO more compatible with our aims than Amazon. But the solution is really too primitive : for example, no localization of the UI, a show-stopper for us.

Emmanuel