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.”