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Linking to ebooks from http://openlibrary.org
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htaccess
Posted 2010-10-27 3:05 AM (#2189)
Subject: Linking to ebooks from http://openlibrary.org



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I was attending a conference today ( http://www.kohacon10.org.nz/ ) and there was a really interesting presentation from someone from the http://www.archive.org.

The have a new project called http://openlibrary.org which seems like a great resource (eg for cover images)

Perhaps you could look at linking to openlibrary pages for the books on the site eg:

http://openlibrary.org/works/OL8698136W/Altered_Carbon

The other really cool thing is they are digitizing old books in a similar fashion to google books. the have some nice reader software that lets you read the books in your browser. It would be nice to link to these for books on the site, eg:

http://www.archive.org/stream/warofworlds00welluoft#page/n5/mode/2u...
http://www.archive.org/details/warofworlds00welluoft

They also have the books in a number of ebook formats

http://www.archive.org/stream/timemachineinven00well#page/n5/mode/2...
http://www.archive.org/stream/islandofdoctormo00welluoft#page/n5/mo...
http://www.archive.org/stream/20000leaguesunde00verniala#page/n3/mo...

of course this type of thing is nothing new, project gutenberg has been around for ages:

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1013

but its still quite cool and a good way to get to read some of the out of print classics.

Edited by htaccess 2010-10-27 3:21 AM
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Administrator
Posted 2010-10-27 8:56 AM (#2191 - in reply to #2189)
Subject: RE: Linking to ebooks from http://openlibrary.org



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Location: Dallas, Texas

@htaccess:  Another great post.  I'm not familiar with openlibrary.org or archive.org but they look like great resources.  I'll have to look those over when I have more time to get into them.

We have a page for eBooks in our Resources section with a lot of book links from Project Gutenberg but we've not taken it as far as we would like.  It's always been our intention to link from the novel pages to those as well but we never got around to getting them all done.  I'd love to expand that section and the sites you've listed look like a great way to do it.

As with everything here it all comes down to time.  Adding links to the DB is not a big deal; We've got a data table for those already.  The issues is the research time.  I'm sure there are lots of free eBooks out there for the books/authors in our DB, especially now that we've added so many old classics from the lists, but finding them is a problem.  I'm getting stretched a little thin on time with the other updates around the site.

Of course, if you, or anybody else for that matter, want to volunteer some time to do the research we're in business.  All I need is a list of titles and links to go with them, maybe in a spreadsheet if you want to get fancy, and I can dump them into the DB. 

Let me know if anyone is interested in helping out.  We can do a skype session to discuss if needed.

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daelectric
Posted 2010-10-27 9:26 AM (#2192 - in reply to #2189)
Subject: Re: Linking to ebooks from http://openlibrary.org



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Location: Plano		Why not just place some JavaScript on the page that goes and checks if there is indeed a page for that book listed on the other site?
This should be especially easy if the other site supports linking to the book based on ISBN. Just a little harder if you have to link to it by Author\Title.
This should be relatively easy once you know the format of the URLs or services to get the required information. I may be able to assist with the programing if need be.
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Administrator
Posted 2010-10-27 11:18 AM (#2199 - in reply to #2192)
Subject: Re: Linking to ebooks from http://openlibrary.org



Admin

Posts: 4101
2000
Location: Dallas, Texas

daelectric - 2010-10-27 9:26 AM Why not just place some JavaScript on the page that goes and checks if there is indeed a page for that book listed on the other site? This should be especially easy if the other site supports linking to the book based on ISBN. Just a little harder if you have to link to it by Author\Title. This should be relatively easy once you know the format of the URLs or services to get the required information. I may be able to assist with the programing if need be.

An interesting notion.  It looks like we can source the eBooks from multiple sites too and I'm not sure I want every novel page going out to check multiple sites on the off chance there is something there every time the page loads.  Seems like that might affect load time which is already a concern for me.  There's a lot of stuff on those pages as is with the ads and blog links etc. already going out to the web.

I'd like to automate some of these things but I don't have the coding skills to do all that so I'm focused on what I can do with what I've got.  I'm certainly willing to investigate options though if you want to have a discussion about it.

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htaccess
Posted 2010-10-27 2:58 PM (#2202 - in reply to #2189)
Subject: Re: Linking to ebooks from http://openlibrary.org



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btw the openlibrary have an api too so doing something similar to what daelectric described with the amazon api would be possible here too. (I think it returns json iirc)
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