Amazon will let you call up a book via wireless and download it into the forthcoming Kindle e-book device with iPoddish simplicity. So the scuttlebutt goes.
Now, what if FBReader and other open source programs were as easy to use? Suppose you didn’t have to mess with a Web browser and could just search for books within your e-reader program, tapping seamlessly into WiFi? Even better, what if you not only saw the title you wanted but also a help list of similar titles?
A natural for FBReader
That’s all within the vision of Hadrien Gareur at FeedBooks, and he’d love to work with FBReader folks to get these features included within program. I think he’s on to something good here and will pass word on to FBReader developer Nikolay Pultsin . And I don’t think this should stop with just FBReader and FeedBooks. I’d love to see industrywide API standards to make possible the integration of all kind of e-reading programs with FeedBooks and other content providers. Ideally there would be user choice.
Right now, in a primitive way, yBook has the Project Gutenberg catalog integrated with it, a nice wrinkle, but Hadrien’s approach will let you stay current with less fuss.
Next step for open source software and pub domain books
“Direct download through dedicated software (our iLiad software) or embedded in a reading software (FBReader or any other open source software) is the next step for mobile devices with some kind of connectivity,” Hardrien says. “It’s easier to offer multiples services and a better User Interface this way, instead of a generic mobile website. Open source software and public domain books will be on par with what Amazon is working on this way.” Exactly—although I think the mobile sites should be there, too.
Hadrien’s similarity feature: See it in action here. Yes, The Picture of Dorian Gray is a long way from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. But this is just a start and presumably will get better, especially as Hadrien adds more titles and the program gets educated better.
Related: Screenshots of the iLiad port (almost done) as posted on MobileRead and Hadrien’s kind offer to help One Laptop Per Child by formatting PDF for the OLPC machine. He already offers customized PDF.
While I might like some extra features like this, I would rather see the author of FBReader spend his time making the program more complete as an ebook reader. Things like tables and CSS are still missing.
I know he has a list of things to add to future versions and I thank him for his effort. It’s just that I like FBReader so much that I’m impatient for it to be more feature complete now 🙂
I agree that full CSS and TOC support in FBReader would be fantastic news.
FBReader is an open source software and although we have limited ressources for the moment, the Feedbooks team could also add this type of feature in the code.
It’s very simple to do a search on Feedbooks and get the result as XML that any parser can use: http://www.feedbooks.com/newsstand/search/Holmes
Added a full help page for our API: http://www.feedbooks.com/help/newsstand_api