Q About Bookpedia 5: ebooks

[vanderdecker]

The question about upgrading to 5, for me, breaks down to: what improvements have been made for handling ebooks? Parsing the Read Me's, I'm not sure that I see any big changes there.
(Lending isn't an issue for ebooks, of course, so tracking copies that way doesn't matter to me.)

Also, the Update window says that Version 5 is a paid update, $12. But the Store here also says that it's $12. Does this mean that there's no update price--that the update and a new copy cost the same?

[vanderdecker]

So... no updates to ebook handling?

[Nora]

Sorry we didn't get back to you quicker. The parsing for ePub files has been improved but we haven't added the new formats we want yet plus a new toolbar in the details view for navigating and viewing the files inside Bookpedia. This is still on our list for the future.

The update price will remain valid indefinitely (the $12 sale on our store and the Mac App Store was just a special one-week sale to allow users who wanted to switch to the MAS the opportunity). The apps are back at their usual price now.

[vanderdecker]

As I work with v. 4, I've come to a conclusion about what would get me to update to a new version. And it breaks down to e-books.

They're the New Thing, after all; more robust handling is decidedly needed.

Here's what I would like:
1) support for multiple format under a single title. This really ought to be a multi-value field (i.e., blue bubble).
2) auto-population of that Format field based on files added to the Links pane. If I drop a folder with .epub, .lit, and .pdf files in it, then those three format should be added to the Format field. I'm no programmer so I don't know if the following is feasible, but can't it just do so based on the file suffix?
-- along that line, if a Folder is added to the Links pane, BP should see the files inside the folder and not just list it as "Folder"
3) even better, make those formats subformats: the Format would be E-book, subformat .epub, .lit., .pdb, ,rtf, .mobi, and so on.
4) Bookpedia needs to be able to handle files that move. I just did the following: from folder AUTHOR I moved file BOOK into subfolder SERIES. So
AUTHOR>BOOK
to
AUTHOR>SERIES>BOOK
that broke the link.
5) I'd like to be able to send those books to an external application--which basically means Calibre, since Amazon has successfully killed Stanza. And that'll mean being able to choose which format I send, if several formats are listed in Bookpedia.

Right now, e-book handling is sort of loosely glued onto the original dead-tree focus of Bookpedia; at the least, it ought to be an equal partner.

[Nora]

Thanks for your very detailed feedback on eBooks in Bookpedia for the future. That'll be helpful when we get to expanding eBook support.