Sony Ebook library idea

[amalthia]

I'm giving some serious thought to creating a community (locked) for people who want to trade Sony E-Reader formated (mostly RTFs I hope) stories. (novels and fan fiction and whatever else people like to read on their reader including manga) However, I'm not sure if there is a protocol for this because this wouldn't be an archive but it's not a rec site (though I doubt people would waste their time converting stories they hate)

So right now I'm debating community names, should I do it or not, if anyone would be interested? I know I immediately started looking for some way to find already formatted stories as soon as I got my e-reader but I couldn't find any sort of trading library for fan fiction. I'm also not sure how to set up a trading system. I just figured I'd upload a list of what I have and the rar file with everything in it...however my collection is already 94MB. At a certain point it'll be too large to share without going to torrents.

I'm at the moment trying to figure out what's absolutely necessary for this community to work without having it explode in my face. (I know people manage to run communities for episode and music downloads,however they are flying under the radar and as far as I can tell they aren't offending their favorite authors)

This community I'm thinking about creating will be mostly about trading fan fiction. I know I didn't ask any author's permission to take their posted fics combine them into single files and format them for my reader (which by the way is very time consuming). And I'm not sure if permission is needed to set up a library for those with e-readers.

So basically this is something I've been thinking about doing for weeks now but I'm not sure how to set it up and promote it without offending people. I don't really imagine there being that many people interested because well I've only met a few other people with ebook readers. But I'm hoping in time more people will discover the Sony Reader and hopefully by then there will be a library of sorts set up for the new users so they don't have to spend hours converting their favorite stories to read on their reader.

Comments

[delibby.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the collections thing is what led me to PDFs, because I sure as hell don't need thousands of small files when I could have dozens of big ones.
I'm assuming that getting files on the Sony Reader has the same problem as me getting files for my ebook. It's the grabbing and cleaning up part that's time consuming. The actual conversion goes quickly. So getting the files to rtf would be the annoying part, doing whatever you want to after that would be easy.

If we were exchanging rtfs then people who want rtfs can do what they want with them. Anyone that wants pdfs can convert to that. Anyone like me that wants to convert to imp files. Anyone with a PDA or smart phone or PSP, ipod, whatever you happen to be reading on can convert from rtf. It offers the most flexibility to the largest number of people.

[chopchica.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the files are fine. It's just that you end up with a main menu of thousands of stories that is then impossible to navigate.

[amalthia]

yeah I think a lot of people complained about not being able to make collections. I'm very very tempted to try this pdf method but I'd like to see how it works first. So far for the shorter stories I've been putting those on the internal memory card in collections and the novels on the external memory.