Think harder about digital books
We currently store all digital content in the mediacenter, except digital books which are stored in the library.
This causes a few problems.
One issue is that we currently can't install library books/specimens with packages, so ebooks are installed in the mediacenter instead. Maybe we should have a new zipped-books
package type to do that, but read on...
Another issue is of content grouping: users interested in a certain topic would browse the mediacenter searching for media related to that topic, and find videos, pictures, etc... But they won't find books about this topic if they are stored in the library.
And finally, it seems that many users (both visitors and staff) don't even know they can find ebooks in the library, but expect it all in the mediacenter.
One idea would be to have a link between the mediacenter and the library, something like « See also these books in the library about this topic ».
Another idea, more drastic would be to store all digital content in the mediacenter, including digital book specimens.
And then book specimens would have a link to the mediacenter instead of storing their own ebooks.
This solves a few problems:
- we can install ebooks with the
zipped-medias
packages, just like today - the content grouping becomes more natural, ebooks appear in the mediacenter along with other digital resources
That would involve a pretty hairy data migration, though.
And we'd probably want to add some metadata to the ebooks in a zipped-medias
package, so that we create the books/specimens when installing such a package.
An even more drastic solution would be to completely merge the mediacenter and library applications. But I have a feeling this quickly gets us into crazyland.
Note that this discussion arose in the context of adding mobi support to the mediacenter (#737)