EBookShelf

What?

A bookshelf for ebooks.

Why?

I'm an SF fan. And I read a lot. A whole lot. I found I could read HTML ebooks from webscriptions on my cellphone if I put them on my webserver. For the first dozen ebooks, keeping an index page manually was no problem. Once my collection hit 100 or so that was just untenable, and I was also wanting to do things like search for authors and sort by series and such - things that a static page just can't do. So I decided to write a bookshelf program for my ebooks. This is it.

How?

In my investigation of the best way to do this, I found that each ebook I got contained, in addition to the pile of HTML chapters, a file that ended in .opf. This turned out to be an 'Open Publishing Format' XML document containing metadata about the ebook. So whee! No need for data entry! Instead the bookshelf crawls the book directory it's pointed at and searches for .opf files to digest and add to its index. One bit of metadata that a .opf file contains is a reference to the table of contents of the ebook in question. The bookshelf takes that and uses it to make the bookshelf 'live' such that clicking on a title lets you read that book.

Status

It's 'good enough', and I use it to index my 250+ ebooks just fine. I have a couple of FutureIdeas that I may add. Suggestions (and patches) welcome!

Downloading

via git: git clone git://git.software.place.org/ebookshelf.git
via http: git clone http://git.software.place.org/git/ebookshelf.git

Contributing

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