Hi everyone, Thank you Mohammad, Julio and Sylvain for your early reactions. Sylvain made me realise that I posted this inside a previous thread by HC! I'll repost it separately (sorry in advance for the inconvenience).
-- Xavier On Tue, Mar 10, 2020 at 6:18 PM Xavier Cazin <[email protected]> wrote: > 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 <http://xn--immatriel-f4a.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: > > 1. 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; > 2. it should be readable both offline or online; > 3. it should open at the same place where you stopped reading last > time; > 4. typesetting should be as beautiful and complex as a website can be; > 5. content should be truly multimedia, including live content from > anywhere on the network. Audio books should be a mere byproduct of this > feature; > 6. authors should be allowed to multiply standpoints on its content; > 7. readers should be able to reorganise the initial content, and also > write above and around it; > 8. for the paranoids out there or those who missed Tim O'Reilly's > famous piece on piracy > > <https://www.oreilly.com/content/piracy-is-progressive-taxation-and-other-thoughts-on-the-evolution-of-online-distribution/> > 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 <http://xn--immatriel-f4a.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 > <http://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: > > 1. The first one is already included in the current prerelease of TW5: > the dynaview plugin > > <https://tiddlywiki.com/prerelease/#%24%3A%2Fplugins%2Ftiddlywiki%2Fdynaview> > allows content to come into view dynamically in response to familiar > gestures like scrolling. > 2. 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. > 3. 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*. > 4. 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 > <https://www.7switch.com/en/list/drmfree/lang-eng/new/page/1/sales>. 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. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TiddlyWiki" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tiddlywiki/CADeSwYOcjiHbXLCWgux0A6d6tP8FXqCfMHAUNCKiRCH7ysoPbQ%40mail.gmail.com.
