[IAEP] calibre + OPDS for offline book catalogs.

[James Simmons]

Gonzalo,

I've been investigating OPDS with calibre as a way of distributing
books with an offline catalog.  As you know, there has always been an
interest in doing this in areas where Internet access is unavailable.

With the help of calibre-OPDS I was able to create both a website and
an OPDS catalog that can easily live in an Apache webroot, a thumb
drive, or a Dropbox folder.  In this way you can easily create a
static website that does NOT require calibre to be running.

Now the bad news: the OPDS catalog seems to be more complex that what
GetBooks can deal with.  It is organized as a hierarchy of XML files,
with lists by Author, Title, Rating, etc.  Instead of having just one
XML file with the whole catalog you have a bunch of them.

The software is described here:

http://dearauthor.com/ebooks/create-your-own-cloud-of-ebooks-with-calibre-calibre-opds-dropbox/

You might try this yourself.  The software is in Java and is really
simple to set up, so you can generate a test OPDS index in no time
from data in a calibre database.

The static website is actually quite useful, and could be used from
the Browse Activity if the website was stored on a thumb drive.  That
might be an alternative to recommend to those who need to distribute
books without Internet access.

James Simmons