Talk:Book reader

PDF collection managment

description of a project for managing collections of pdfs / book scans from archives

Key objectives:

 - Make it easy for children to download high-quality content, e.g. digital library resources
 - Make it easy for schools to distribute reading lists that link to specific resources
 - Make it easy for children to share books or other resources, and to post comments about the resources
 - Tie in tightly with metadata systems

Data sources:

- "Feeds"
   - Contain metadata and data/blobs
   - "Upstream" feeds: school syllabus; Google Book Search
   - "Peer" feeds (see "Share" below)
- Resource examples
   - PDFs (books / other documents)
   - Wikipedia pages, or other web pages, for offline reading
      - Management of recursive fetching
      - Browser integration: queuing of links for later download when reading offline
   - Images/video

Capabilities:

- Browse
   - Metadata browser (browse by category etc.)
   - Google Book Search and other web-enabled browsers, that allow previewing content without downloading it all
- Search
   - Structured: metadata search
   - Unstructured: keyword search
- Download
   - Download resources from a feed
   - Support resume, parallel downloads through a simple download manager, etc.
   - Server-side support for download of limited page ranges for large PDFs?  
     (e.g. fetch 100 pages at a time, creating smaller PDF)
- Share
   - Management and synchronization of resources
      - RSS/atom/"playlists" with attached blob resources
      - Build on libraries for service discovery and file-sharing
      - Limited total storage space => need to be able to swap resources in and out 
        like iTunes / Synchropated / Conduit
   - Create own feeds and re-publish resources to the feed
      - Allow kids to add own "soft" metadata to their own feeds, that is kept separate 
        from actual resource metadata: personalized summary; opinions/comments/essays; 
        star rating; categorization/tags/keywords; illustrations etc.

API:

- Simple, driven by capabilities above
- Add a book API to the Google GData APIs?

Copyright issues:

- Only highlight public domain / CC-BY content, but don't build any sort of content controls
  into the client (that's not the right place for it).
- Strong attention to proper attribution of the original author[s] and publisher[s].  As such
  primary metadata (metadata from a primary upstream source) will not be editable in the client.
  "Soft" metadata, e.g. comments / user categorization etc. can be added but is kept separate
  from primary metadata.