Book People Archive

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

On Fri, 2 Nov 2001, richard seltzer wrote:

>Good idea.
>I just hope that someone does it, and gets the major book distributors to
>buy-in.

Well, creating a basic program to ID a book file in text format would be
simple enough.  Having it do HTML would not be too hard either.  PDF, I
think there are plenty of libraries, especially if interested in text
only, not formatting.  I know of at least one Microsoft Word to
text/html converter program, could use its library.  
First version, Mac. Windows. Unix.
- perhaps only taking the book as a commandline argument, and returning
hash.
Later, GUI, connecting to online database and returning info.

At the moment I go to school full-time and work as a
coder/sysadmin/analyst full-time.
However, this December is my last semester.  Also, although I can't commit
much time at the moment, I wouldn't mind locating a server to host the
lookup database, starting the project website, setting up CVS, developer
mailing list etc.
If a few people express an interest, and there is no preexisting project
that makes this redundant, I don't mind starting setting things up, and
laying out a preliminary timeline.