Of all #nostr projects this has got to be one of the most exciting.
GM and a happy New Year, Nostriches.
We at nostr:npub1s3ht77dq4zqnya8vjun5jp3p44pr794ru36d0ltxu65chljw8xjqd975wz have reached another milestone, on our way to #Alexandria v 0.1.0 (Gutenberg edition).
We have printed the entire Bible using 30040/30041 notes and made them available for you to peruse, using a pre-release of our Nostr client. The books are broken down by chapter. Breakdowns by verse will be delivered with the beta release. In addition, we have printed "Jane Eyre", so that you get some idea of how quickly a full-length novel can load. We are working on making it faster, with pagination, but this is already surprisingly quick.
You can't yet use the client to upload books (please use the e-book CLI, for that), and it's all a bit buggy and wonky, but we have already implemented a first pass at the Visualization page.
Feel free to view the Asciidoc test data, here: https://next-alexandria.gitcitadel.eu/. You can log in with a browser extension. (We are still working on the site certificate. Please excuse the mess.)
Discussion
when reading this I instantly started imagining a kindle-like app to self-publish your own books on nostr and profit with zaps
Yes 💯. I start wondering if one can build a #nostr reader on an ebook
Yeah, that's what we're building, next version.
That's why we choose to do the 30041 events with Asciidoc, as that's a markup language that allows you to define everything you need to generate an ePUB (or LaTeX, PDF, AsciiMath, etc.), like cover image, type (Bible, scientific, novel, code, audiobook, etc.) for the style-sheets, summary, edition info, etc.
We're using the Asciidoctor platform, which already contains the functionality to convert and export. Implementing that has taken a loooong time, but it was worth it.
But we're also going to make an ePaper reader, so that you can view the books directly as notes, without having to convert. That means that you can then keep the cool Nostr functionality, like highlights and bookmarks and zaps. Or you can review a book, by replying to the 30040 with a kind 1111, and then all of your frens see your review, when they look at the book's index card. Or zap-to-decrypt a book.
That sort of thing.