How to delivering book pages to the screen one by one??

Question

Hello.
I have written a lot on www, see http://www.europas-historie.net/ and there have been more than a million visitor, and there was very much work and no money to earn. Now I will try something new. I will translate texts which are in the public domain into Norwegian, Kafka, Mark Twain, Tolstoy, Maupassant etc. og publish some of them as ordinary books, and will make them available for download as pdf-files, for a fee.
I will give free access to a large part of these texts and books, but not let readers download all the texts. I will like to show them the way books.google.com gives readers access to books on the screen, or the way Amazon lets readers look inside books, or the way safaribooksonline.com do it. Which software do these sites use? It looks to me like there is a pdf file and a program which delivers pages from this file to the screen? Which programs/software is necessary to do this? Is it possible in Dreamweaver? How? Which software will let me do it most easely?
Tor Førde

Answer 1

You are asking the wrong question(s). This has little or nothing to do with the frontend programming. Much more important is the backend and, since you obviously are not terribly rich, I'd say forget it. What you would need is the following:
- multiple databases managing the indices for authors, titles etc.
- databases for holding text and images for the books
- a dynamic PDF generating software or alternatively a huge storage holding all the PDFs ready to use
- databases holding the preview pages as HTML and images or alternatively a processing software that can extract and convert that data from the data to be used in the books
Only after that can you worry about the frontend, but it still means implementing a search engine and a way to navigate. Obviously there is some overlap and bits and pieces can be left out, but if you realyl want it the fancy way, you need a lot more than Dreamweaver. Even if mySQL, Ghostscript, Tex2PDF and other stuff are free, you need considerable juice on the server end and wil lspend a lot of time getting it to run/ keep it running. Therefore I do not see it ever coming into the daylight.
Instead consider a much, much simpler solution. Install a pre-configured content management system like Joomla, Typo3 or a blog software like WordPress. They all offer easy database management and allow managed uploads/ downloads as well as user management. You would hack the excerpts from the books in the database and the users can view them as normal HTML/PHP pages. If they decide to buy, they'd send you an automated message via a contact form and then you grant them access to the files on the server by setting up a user account and directory that gives them access to their book. Of course it's still quite a bit of manual intervention, but that's the only way I can see it working without financially ruining yourself.
Mylenium