Feedbooks: an open source platform for e-books
Feedbooks has developed its own technology to generate e-books on the fly. It promises “an easy way to find, publish and download e-books in a large number of formats, while focusing on creating the best experience for e-books”.
I asked Hadrien GARDEUR, co-founder of this Paris-based initiative, whether his project was open source, my question being triggered by the possibility of publishing for the Kindle platform, which has DRM built in.
Here’s the informative reply:
“Feedbooks is developed using an open-source framework (Ruby On Rails) and is running on FreeBSD+Lighttpd+MySQL (all open-source too).
Our main focus with Feedbooks is to provide a service for e-book publishing that anyone can use (to publish public domain titles, Creative Comons titles or their own titles without a license), but also a place where people can find and discover e-books. Since we believe that to reach a maximum number of users, Feedbooks need to broadcast content on mobile platforms too, we’ve opened Feedbooks to third party services and software through a REST API. Stanza is the first software to use this API with their iPhone application.
We’re also the first platform who fully supported the ePub standard for e-books, and in general, we tend to focus on standards rather than proprietary formats for e-books.
Concerning the Kindle: it is a completely vertical platform, but their file format is just a modified version of the Mobipocket format. DRM-less Mobipocket files work fine on the Kindle, and that’s what we distribute for this platform. The built-in EVDO enable the Kindle to download content from any website, and we use this feature to distribute our books directly to the device.”
September 9th, 2008 at 2:05 pm
Interesting. The framework is open source, but the code itself wouldn’t appear to be - and since the code is not distributed, it doesn’t have to be. Therefore, the right answer is that the project itself is not open source but is built upon open source - which is really not a problem. It’s just a difficult question to answer due to the different contexts in which the phrase ‘open source’ is (ab)used.
That said, I signed up and will be poking around. I don’t have a book reader - they haven’t come down in price enough for me to take them seriously - but I do have a PC. And PCs are pretty good for this sort of thing.
September 11th, 2008 at 4:09 am
Thanks for those important details, Taran.
Michel