[IAEP] calibre + OPDS for offline book catalogs.

[mokurai at earthtreasury.org]

On Tue, June 7, 2011 2:30 pm, Gonzalo Odiard wrote:
> I will download Calibre and try it. If this not works, we can use code
> from Pathagar to create a catalog
> or use python to create the catalog.xml file with the data in the csv
> file, or use another
> simpler format (like json) to create local catalogs.
> I only need a little of time. This week si packed.
>
> Gonzalo

Valerie Taylor and I are both very much interested in using such a
solution for the Replacing Textbooks project. We already know of sites
with 100,000 Open Education resources, and the rate of development is
accelerating. I just learned earlier today that Bangladesh has put more
than 100 of its existing K-12 textbooks online for free downloading,
covering its entire curriculum.

> On Sat, Jun 4, 2011 at 5:54 PM, James Simmons <nicestep at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> 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
>>
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-- 
Edward Mokurai
(默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر
ج) Cherlin
Silent Thunder is my name, and Children are my nation.
The Cosmos is my dwelling place, the Truth my destination.
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Replacing_Textbooks