Question

what would be the best way to code an e-book library in php? how should the e-books be displayed? should the contents be generated from the database or from sources like txt or pdf? altho i’d prefer the ebooks to be displayed in html format, not pdf. are there any good online tutorials on this?

i’d appreciate your thoughts.

Answer 1

I think you are running into problems because of your terminology, main e-book. For example, what you want to do won’t work on my Kindle I expect, but do you want to do something similar to Google Books or Scribd?

Ideally you should store the content in the most flexible format you can, to have the maximum amount of information, as you can then dumb it down to the format you want to display it in.

So, you could store it as xml or LaTeX, and then if you want to convert it to pdfs, html or text you can pull arrange it as needed.

As to how to display it, that depends largely on how you want people to interact with your application.