PLIP - Plone 5 as a substitute for Ebook

Plone Support
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I am in the process of launching my maiden book. Yes the website around it would be plone 5. But I want to draw the community attention to something I find interesting. While i did the DTP of the book myself, after I wrote the first draft, I actually created the book on the site. And when I generally reviewed it on my mobile (through the net), it was indeed very good.
I think this area is a low hanging fruit which developers and the Plone team should look at. I am referring to a few features which if added, independent authors could easily use this platform for Ebook.

The additions in my view needs to be towards the commercial aspects of taking a payment or subscription and then of giving access after a payment is done. I have actually not thought through the requirements. Any views on the feasibility and if any work has already happened.

I would be releasing the book on kindle. But it would be a matter of pride for me if it was available though my plone site.

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Use collective.documentviewer to display PDFs

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I think html will display the book in much better way than a pdf. I will share my book on plone once it is ready. I have it currently too, but it was a much earlier draft.

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just searched for some debate on this topic.

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@sudhan77 what did you end up doing?

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Hi Kim,
I published my book in physical format and also in Kindle. As for the plone 5, I did not take up that project. I have however kept a few chapters of the book open in my blog (which is in Plone 5) but some of the critical chapters that had a lot of images are not open. Please check this:

Thanks
Sudhanshu

1 Like
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@tkimnguyen
Just checked again. I do have the entire book on my blog. Only a few chapters are open to serve as teasers. In case you would want to review it, please let me know. I can give you the access to the book.

Sudhanshu

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The work @hvelarde has been doing with AMP could apply maybe if you wanted readers to view your book as normal Plone pages.

Collective.behavior.amp 1.0a2 released

and this discussion:

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Another option I have been considering is releasing the book as an app.

I did a quick test on android and it works (great), but I have not tested on iOS .

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.... I am continuing my work on this.

I am thinking about two ways of doing it, feedback is very welcome.

Background

  • Right now, I am using ( a little customized) Markdown (and some html for the tables), to produce this
    http://k1.medialog.no
  • PDFs are generated with produce and publish and phantomjs (but I might have to switch to wkhtmltopdf to get table of contents
  • Ebooks are generated with Calibre (for the moment, I need to add the TOC (and front-image manually)
  • Math is done with 'mathjax', works quite well online, in PDFs and in many Ebok Readers ( iBooks, Supreader )

Next steps:

  • Each book gets its own URL and theme using collective.lineage

  • Maybe, I could try to make an 'export to app' if it could be possible to use PhoneGap or something else to automatically make an app

  • Or maybe it is better to make an 'offline' version
    Since each book has its own url and theme, it might be possible to use html5 cache manifest to have browsers automatically download everything in that folder and its subfolders

  • The cache.manifest could be a browser view that returns the URL of 'everything in the folder and its subfolders, + CSS and javascript (maybe a setting in the control panel to add these (?)

Could one (or both) of these approaches work?

... or could it be possible to 'combine them' ?

Anything else I should think of ?