HC Haase
Birthe C
TonyM
HC Haase
Xavier Cazin
thank you for your suggestions. I also fail in getting tw-receiver to work. Properly some issue with my hosting (htacces and permissions is checked).But I begin to think, that this is too much hassle. Maybe I just drop my file once in a while via ftp. It was a cool concept though.
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TonyM
If you want me to share the setting I used just ask
Regards
Tony
Xavier Cazin
Hi everyone,
TL;DR: Go to https://www.7switch.com/fr/ebook/9783962558772/great-expectations-serapis-classics, click on "Read an extract" and play with it. Then come back if you'd like to know more.
I have been working in the publishing industry for the past 25 years, including the last 10 years as the co-founder of a French ebook distribution company, immatériel.fr. Among many things that got me frustrated in the course of selling ebooks is the fact that ebook formats have never been in phase with how we have linked ourselves to knowledge in the two last decades.
The main reason for this particular failure is because ePub and Mobipocket were initially (around 2010) imposed to publishers by Apple and Amazon respectively, and became soon the only digital formats that publishers could sell to the main vendors (actually, Google Play Books also sells PDF books).
While there are other reasons to rant about the current state of the ebook market, I gave some thought about what could be a likeable modern format for eBooks, and as you guessed, TiddlyWiki checked all the boxes:
- the book should be easy to open: the reading app could be the same browser that you used to buy the book, whether you are on your mobile or at your desktop;
- it should be readable both offline or online;
- it should open at the same place where you stopped reading last time;
- typesetting should be as beautiful and complex as a website can be;
- content should be truly multimedia, including live content from anywhere on the network. Audio books should be a mere byproduct of this feature;
- authors should be allowed to multiply standpoints on its content;
- readers should be able to reorganise the initial content, and also write above and around it;
- for the paranoids out there or those who missed Tim O'Reilly's famous piece on piracy back in the days, book content should be easy to encrypt. Ebooks lending to libraries might actually be a good use case.
So we at immatériel.fr considered that this territory was worth exploring and we dedicated our 2019 R&D efforts into building a TW5 alternative format for customers who were regularly buying ePubs at our experimental bookstore 7switch.com. We had to move forward on two fronts in parallel:
- Converting our full catalog of 80K ePubs from more than 1000 (mostly French) publishers into TW5
- Figuring a way to display books in an homogeneous way, yet familiar enough for both people reading content on the Web and people used to ePub reading apps, while showing off their new TiddlyWiki nature.
So I asked Jeremy if he'd welcome a sponsoring for such a project through his company Federatial and, to my awe, he said yes of course! Parallely, since I wasn't sure of how we should render the typical book elements nor the typical features of an ebook reading app in a TW5 interface, I asked JD, one of our gifted community contributors to TW5 user interfaces, for ideas and preliminary tests.
Soon enough, the three of us had regular meetings, that eventually led to a preliminary release of several great open source products that are now embedded into every non-DRM books and extracts that you'll find at the 7switch ebookstore:
- The first one is already included in the current prerelease of TW5: the dynaview plugin allows content to come into view dynamically in response to familiar gestures like scrolling.
- Next comes the dynannotate plugin, which will soon make its way to 5.1.22, and is already included in books and extracts that you can find on 7switch. With it, you can annotate content in a various number of ways.
- Then you'll find the ePub-slicer
plugin, a tool to convert any ePub file into a plugin that essentially
contains a list of small content chunks (aka tiddlers!) which can be
revealed during the scroll as you read the book in the browser. Thanks
to their plugin nature, not only multiple converted books can be hosted
in a single TW5 file, but also one can override book content without
fear, since the original shadow tiddlers could be retrieved at any time.
Note that the HTML parsing is not yet complete, as we'd like to be able
to parse any ePub, whether their content has been well semantised or
not. So if you see spurious
</li>or</blockquote>every once in a while, don't be surprised: you're looking at a work in progress. - Finally, you'll also find JD's TW Book Wrapper
plugin, which is responsible for most specific UI elements, from
annotations management to the automatic language switching, based on
your browser default language. By the way, we started with French and
English as bu
ilt-in interface languages. If you'd like to submit more translations, you're welcome!
Please have a try with any non-DRM books (or their extracts) that you'll find on 7switch. Also try to drag and drop your own ePubs (in so-called Author Mode) to add books in these TW5 containers. And tell us what you think!
Thank you for having read so far :-)
Cheers,
Xavier.
