“Read in Ibis Reader” widget available
by Liza Daly
Publishers and authors have been asking us for an easy way to get readers started with their books in Ibis Reader. Because Ibis is a part of the Web rather than a standalone application, we can easily add an ePub book that’s available on the web with a simple URL:
http://ibisreader.com/library/add/?epub=URL-of-the-ePub
For example, to add this book (or any one of their nearly 2 million texts!) from the Internet Archive:
If you have an Ibis Reader account, the book will be automatically added to your library and opened to the first page. If you don’t, just register using our easy two-field sign-up form and the book will be waiting for you.
We’re also releasing an icon you can use to wrap this link:
Here’s some sample HTML if you’d like to start embedding links on your own pages:
<a href="http://ibisreader.com/library/add/?epub=URL-of-the-ePub"> <img src="http://ibis_logos.s3.amazonaws.com/read-in-ibis-reader.png" alt="Read in Ibis Reader" width="300" height="61" /> </a>
You’ll need to encode the URL of your ePub file, either using the function in your programming language or a form like http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/dencoder/ (paste a URL and hit encode
).
Please let us know if you’d like a custom icon at a different size.
Update: Thanks to David Pierron in the comments, there’s now a bookmarklet. Just drag this into your Bookmarks bar in most browsers: Open in Ibis Reader.
Comments
That’s awesome! Now we just need a bookmarklet that prefixes the http://ibisreader.com/library/add/?epub= and does the URL encode! To use e.g. on archive.org book listings…
Here you go :
javascript:function%20ibisRead()%7Bvar epub=window.prompt(‘Enter the ePub URL…’,document.location.href);window.location = ‘http://ibisreader.com/library/add/?epub=’+encodeURIComponent(epub);%7DibisRead();void(0)
The default value in the prompt is the current URL (although I don’t know how you could get a valid .epub file in the URL without opening it first…)
I experimentally added support for this feature in Calibre2Opds HTML catalogs, and ran into a problem : when a user uses this widget, his ePub file is added to his IbisReader library ; but when he uses the widget a second time with the same ePub, it’s added a second time…
What would be great, would be to use the metadata in the ePub file, if possible the ISBN (), or maybe the unique id () to identify the book and look through the library, opening it at the last known position if it already exists, importing it if it does not…
I hope you get my message !
David.
of course, the XML elements I pasted in my last comment do not show… here they are (replace the square brackets with angle brackets) :
ISBN: [dc:identifier opf:scheme="ISBN"]
Unique id: [dc:identifier id="uuid_id" opf:scheme="uuid"]
Yep, we’re aware of this and will be fixing it. Thanks!
[...] can encourage visitors to your site to add your Catalog to Ibis Reader using the same type of widget we introduced for reading ePubs: http://ibisreader.com/catalogs/add/?url=URL-of-the-Catalog&name=Best+Catalog+Ever [...]
Is it possible to upload and view books which are stored locally or on another server? I am building a website in which an epub reader functionality should be available. User will upload their epub books, and they will be stored on a server. So is it possible to use ibis reader to open them?
No, that’s not currently possible. The ebooks must be added to the user’s account.