On 06/07/2012 03:36 PM, Magnus Manske wrote:
On Thu, Jun 7, 2012 at 1:37 PM, Emmanuel Engelhart
<emmanuel(a)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-t…
*
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