in related news, i cant believe libgen is still down 🥲
libgen over nostr with books hosted on blossm servers would be amazing
Discussion
re: libgen, disappointing, libgen+ is available
re: books over nostr: I have been thinking about this a lot:
- NIP-23 markdown is enough for most books
- converion to epub can be done using Calibre, pandoc, Google Docs
I'm working on an app series that renders markdown similar to the Apple Books app 
why turn books into markdown when theres formats dedicated to render books already?
storying books as nip-23 events doesnt seem very pratical, especially books with images, charts, footnotes/citations something that book formats handle really well
using comics as an example of reading material that couldnt work as markdown, a nostr reading app could look something like tachiyomi/mihon (a comic/manga reader) where instead of connecting to directories of hosted sources it'd just be a list of npubs reading off notes pointing where the content is hosted instead 🤔
Markdown because it is a format that works with NIP-23. The vast majority of books need only the most basic markdown (if that). No extension or deviation from the spec is needed.
Anything with images is a different matter, comic idk much about, but they are normally specific formats right?
yeah, nostr's replacement for any online library is probably NIP35 torrent posts, not NIP23 long text
Form over function?
It’s text, no need to turn it into a binary blob
It's too much text to rely on centralized hosting for, plus images etc
Posting torrents of all the files is easier to do with archives of these libraries, instead of converting every book to a new format
Eg these classics are all perfect in markdown https://github.com/mlschmitt/classic-books-markdown turning one of those into a NIP-23 works perfectly, and they can be read in any client
if the goal is to store material conveniently (as a whole) and broadcast widely, a binary blob of verifiable packets would do much better than a garbeled mess of text attached to a signature to check against. for example, a relay would have to send the whole note before a book could ever render, whereas some pdfs can load a partial book and resume half-way through downloading.
sending an ebook through nip23 would be like sending an mp3 on FM radio. kinda going backwards here even though it's all "just text"
nip23 is great for blogging
i still think its cool that you want to bring markdown books onto nostr though
I like the goal of getting as many people exposed as many books as possible.
I understand that some people also want the Project Gutenberg version of The Iliad in Mobi format etc., I would focus on ease of exposure