Sourceforge blogged on us

Lee Schlesinger from Source Forge posted a blog on eLibrary.

Here is the article’s content:

---

eLibrary is a free, full-featured ebook organizer
Posted on Wednesday, October 7th, 2009 by leeschlesinger
Category: General
“My goal is to make eLibrary into more than just another organizer – to make eLibrary a one-stop shop for all ebook-related needs, including syncing with various readers, format conversion, an ebook viewer, and more.” So says Amir Shaked, creator of the eLibrary ebook organizer application.

 

Normally I interview project leaders for these blog entries, but Amir essentially wrote this piece himself:

This project was born out of my own personal need to easily manage and tag my ebooks. Other organizers I looked up were commercial or didn’t have the organizing features I wanted. When I first uploaded the project to SF.net I hadn’t thought it would attract much interest, but more and more people downloaded it, requested features, and offered to help. So I decided to expand the project further, released more improvements, and maintained a close interaction with users who reported errors and suggested features.

One of the strongest features of eLibrary is the ISBN guesser, which attempts to locate the book’s ISBN (International Standard Book Number) by scanning the book’s text for the ISBN, checking the filename, or looking it up in Amazon and Google. All this is done automatically, so that in order to add a book, all that is required of the user is to drag a file into eLibrary in order to catalogue it.

The latest eLibrary release includes a highly improved user interface and a few more cataloguing options. Also, the metadata is downloaded from the Google Books service, so that a book’s downloaded info also includes auto-tagging and the book’s description. Another nice feature is the web interface, enabling users to both view their library and access the file.

eLibrary is developed using Visual Studio 2008. The main language is C#, with .Net 2.0 compliance. I am sticking to .Net 2.0 so that in the future I can port it to Mono. I also created a website to host the online help for the project: http://www.openelibrary.org

When I thought about creating this project as an open source one, SF.net seemed like the perfect place. I have been using the site for as long as it has existed, and the services it offers to projects were all I needed. It has proved to be a worthwhile decision, since SF.net brings 95% of the traffic and downloads to eLibrary.

In hope to expand the project further, I recently posted a “help wanted” ad in the SF.net community. I am looking for C# developers, designers, content editors, and translators. Anyone interested in helping can contact me via the SF.net forums, tracker, or email.

You can read the original article here: http://sourceforge.net/community/elibrary-is-a-free-full-featured-ebook-organizer.