[sword-devel] Google eBooks

[Greg Hellings]

On Tue, Dec 7, 2010 at 12:11 AM, Chris Little <chrislit at crosswire.org> wrote:
> On 12/6/2010 9:34 AM, Troy A. Griffitts wrote:
> As far as selection of non-PD material goes, I'm not terribly impressed.
> Amazon, Apple, & Google each have different sets books available, but I
> believe Amazon still leads overall. Completely unscientifically: Of the four
> books being used for the class I'm teaching in spring, three are available
> in each of the stores, but Amazon has one set of three and Apple & Google
> share a different set of three.

One of the nice things that Apple has not (yet) done is block the
Amazon Kindle app from its store.  So a user of an iPad or iPhone can
access their Amazon Kindle collection from their iDevice.  They also
have an application for Android users to do the same.

I don't know if Google has an application like that or if their books
are compatible with other ebook readers which might be available on
those platforms - though their scans of the PD works would still
suffer the scrolling issues.

I'd be astounded if Apple's ebooks are useful on anything other than
an iDevice without some major hacking.

I would think some of the HTML widgets which our applications use
might be use could potentially know how to handle an external
application already to display a PDF (MacSword's embedding of Safari
and possibly BT's embedding of QWebKit?  Maybe Xiphos with Xulrunner?
Would be an interesting trick to see if the widgets support the
plugins on the system the way the full browsers do).  For BibleCS,
you're on your own, Troy. ;-)

--Greg