Book People Archive

Re: Re: Possible conference for on-line book publishing?

On Fri, 2 Nov 2001, richard seltzer wrote:
>Combine those factors and the costs for a small ebook publisher could be
>enormous -- and it's all unnecessary. A simple program could assign numbers
>automatically, instantly, for practically nothing.

Hm. A central e-text versioning resource?  Perhaps a program that MD5sums
non-whitespace text, and IDs the book based on that?

Central registry could be a database with low overhead, it would only take
a sum and output a name of version author, title, version/branch info, and
perhaps e-mail address description.

Registering in the database would be simply involve creating an
account, then pasting in a sum created by a program optimised for text
documents (stripping whitespace would be a start), and optionally pasting
in the originating document sum, in order to allow a version tree.

That'd be a fun project!