Who needs a weekend project?

With the day job, I find myself around a lot of very interesting characters – some crazy smart people. Which is always good.

I mean, don’t get me wrong, I hang out with crazy smart people every time I’m with my wife. I read crazy smart people on the internet. I listen to crazy smart people in the podcast. But there’s something about being around someone who is crazy smart face to face that’s just different.

So, one of the things that FIP always talked about but never really got off the ground was RSS delivery of ebooks. The delivery is probably pretty simple – it’s an RSS feed, and the ebook is provided via a link or an enclosure, like a podcast. So that’s not that difficult to set up. The hard part is how to catch it and make it automatically readable on your computer, your e-reader, your phone, or your tablet. And that means building some kind of app.

We had thought about applying this to something like serialized fiction – where you have a number of chapters that get released bit by bit over time. You could do that by making them all separate ebook files, and that’s probably how people are solving that now (to the extent that people are doing it at all). Basically, it’s taking the podcast model and applying it to text. Separate files.

But I don’t know that it’s the best way to handle it.

I guess first you need to understand something about what an ebook is. I haven’t done a lot of looking under the hood at .mobi files, but I have been up to my elbows in the guts of epub files. Mobi can’t be all that different. And here’s what an ebook is – it’s just a set of hyperlinked web pages, zipped together with a specific hierarchy. Period.

Serious. It’s just a re-named zip file. If you’ve got an epub (or can get your hands on one from someplace like Gutenberg or Baen’s free library, then make a copy of it on your desktop, and rename the file extension from ePub to zip, and extract it. And what you’ll see is, essentially, a stack of web pages linked together in a particular structure. And if you do anything on the web, you can build your own pretty easily. I usually use Sigil to build an epub file.

Now, here’s my thought. There are two problems with RSS delivery of an ebook.

The Delivery. How to get the book from the RSS feed into a reader app?
Not Losing Your Place. Because if I’m working my way through someone’s book, I don’t want to have to do a lot of flipping back and forth to find my page again. That’s a non-starter.

So, an app. A new app that would be a basic e-reader, and could add chapters to the end of a current work, smart enough to recognize a new update in an RSS feed, grab the file and insert it in the place of the prior one, while keeping your place from where you were reading in the old file.

Here’s where I start just randomly speculating how current e-reader apps work.

If I was designing an e-reader app, knowing what I do about epub structure, I’d tie the “bookmark” or “last read place” to

The last internal web page you were looking at.
and the line number in that web page that appears at the top of the screen on that last viewed page

Then if you download a new file with more chapters on the end, the prior chapters (which are separate webpages) should all be the same with no changes in their names, the lines should be the same up to where you’ve read in the current chapter, and all you’re doing is adding more train track in front of where the reader has gotten to.

So, all my software engineer buddies out there. Here’s the idea. Maybe that works, maybe it won’t because my understanding of e-reader software is incorrect. Maybe it doesn’t work because of something else. Or… maybe it does work, and all of a sudden you have something you can put in an author’s hands to put stories in front of their readers…? Something that could be skinned and branded for a particular author so that if you wanted to get everything written by, say, a podcast author, but you want to get it in text.

Then the fans subscribe to a secured feed – maybe there’s a subscription fee, maybe not, but if there is, it becomes another revenue source for the author.

Am I overthinking it? Is it enough just to put chapters out on a blog, which is what I see other authors doing, particularly on a Friday?