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Subject: Re: The brick and mortar
From: "Arav K." <nothien@uber.space>
To: "Callum Brown" <callum@calcuode.com>, <~mieum/booksin.space@lists.sr.ht>
Date: Thu, 29 Oct 2020 16:56:53 +0100
Message-Id: <C6PHXXPYLMI1.1Z91Y81JTHKFS@gux>
In-Reply-To: <C6PGRDVDCIYH.22XCM7CNMUV1B@callum-computer>

On Thu Oct 29, 2020 at 5:01 PM UTC, Callum Brown wrote:
> Should there be a standard format the books should be in (e.g. contents
> at the start, ## for chapter headings), or would anything be alright as
> long as it's Gemtext? I think it would be nice to have some consistency,
> but books can be very varied in terms of layout so it might not be
> possible. Especially with non-fiction which might have references,
> images etc.

I think it's best to leave space for some variation.  I suppose images
and stuff will have to be packaged with the books, and the books will
contain (relative) links to those images at the appropriate places, with
captions.

I'm imagining that a book lives at the URL
booksin.space/<category>/<book short name>/<lang>.gmi, with images (and
any other assets, such as original versions like PDFs) in the same
directory, and with booksin.space/<category>/<book short name>.tar for
an archive of the entire book.  Then metadata could be stored separately
at booksin.space/<category>/<book short name>/metadata.yml.

> I like the idea of the books having pages, but for simplicity's sake
> that might be something best left to the user/client.

I agree, although I think some sort of marker for pages and lines
(useful for plays) may be needed.  Also, books often have multiple
editions, so that will also have to be taken care of somehow (probably
by making <lang>.gmi into <edition>.<lang>.gmi, and namespacing other
assets similarly).

> I think translations of the same book should all be linked, so that
> you could look at a list of books by a certain author and see all the
> translated versions. On a related note there's probably going to have
> to be some way of managing different language versions of the
> booksin.space interface itself.

I think my above system would provide that ability.  I assume that the
page at /<category>/<book short name> would list different translations
and assets and give information from the metadata file.

> With respect to metadata, how should multiple values be dealt with?
> For example if there are multiple authors or genres.

I assume if we're using YAML that we can just use lists for referring to
some values for authors and genres and other fields.  The parser will
have to take that into account.

~aravk | ~nothien