Project Alexandria aims to make books in the public domain accessible, beautiful and easy to manage.
- file formats for many devices and screen sizes
- easy to find and download
- page layout and typography that supports the reading experience
- beautiful to look at
- one master file format from which all other formats are derived
- easy collaboration and errata contribution via a distributed version control system
We very much like the work of Project Gutenberg (http://www.gutenberg.org/). Project Alexandria does not compete with PG in regard to providing and preserving as many books as possible.
We intend to create fewer eBooks that are joyful to read.
This repository does not yet contain finished books or production ready code. We use it to structure our efforts and to have the proposed solution approaches (with examples) in one place.
We need help from a lot of different people.
You can find us
- on our mailing list: http://groups.google.com/group/prj-alexandria
- in IRC: #ProjectAlexandria on irc.freenode.net
Currently we are discussing technical solutions to the discovered problems. This repo contains the main ideas (ideally with examples) to have everything in one central place.
Every subfolder containing a solution proposal shall contain a README with
- a short abstract
- a list of pros and cons of the solution
If we store each book in a folder, which files must be present (the main body of text, metadata, ..) and which files may be present (e.g. images)? Do we split a book into multiple files/chapters?
How can we store many books in useful structure? How do we cope with translations? How and where do we store additional data to make the library searchable?
In which master format shall we store books? What are the requirements for such a file format?
What are the formats that users need to conveniently read/print books on their devices? How can we automate the conversion to those file formats? How can we make the books beautiful?
Some books from a diverse range to test ideas on real-life examples.