online html book reader?

[JustinW]

Anyone know of an inexpensive and SEO friendly way to display book pages in an online html reader? I am developing a bookstore website where people can read the entire book online before buying, and the option of using an online flash-based PDF reader doesn't work for SEO. In the html format, the books would have to be displayed page by page so people couldn't steal and distribute the entire book easily. Is the only way to do this by programming every page or is there a program, script or compiler that is good for SEO and will do the job cheaply? There are many online libraries that have hundreds of thousands of pages readable online, so how do they do it cheaply? Thanks.

[KDLA]

If they read the book online, it's highly doubtful they'll buy it -- or worse, lots of people will link to your pages, stealing your content. ;)

I suggest you use Amazon.com's method of only posting a few pages -- just enough to connote the author's writing style.

[JustinW]

The problem as a author / book publisher these days is Google and other sites are scanning away like crazy and it is inevitable that other people will have the content online soon (legally or illegally), so my thought is to present it first and in a good format for reading and SEO so that our website is ranked highly for the content and may generate some Adsense/Adwords revenue on top of any sales. The books are not bestsellers, are dated (but still in copyright) and very high page count making it difficult to copy and paste.
The problem I see is the cost of getting the printed pages formatted in HTML to display one page at a time in a simple html reader box. Does anyone know of a cost efficient way of doing it? Any programs or scripts? Or is the only option to do it manually page by page. Thanks.

[JustinW]

Here is an example link from another website with the book text integrated into the page source html: http://www.online-literature.com/shakespeare/romeo_and_juliet/2/

In this example each page of the book refreshes the web page and it is kept short so people can't copy the whole book in one copy and paste.
Thanks.

[slaughters]

What format are the books currently in ?

PDF ? Word ? Text ? Online Database ?

P.S.

Mobipocket eBook Creator is free and can output HTML (along with a ton of other e-book formats)
http://www.mobipocket.com/en/DownloadSoft/ProductDetailsCreator.asp

[JustinW]

The files are in Word and PDF with hidden text, both copy and pasteable. I was thinking I could use an html converter like Stanza or Mobipocket to easily make the code, but then these don't make single pages from a 500 page book, just one long file which can be easily copied and redistributed illegally. Having it in single pages makes it too much of a hastle to rip off. I actually want to let the users have free access to the reading, but I don't want to lose the work and investment entirely.
Ideally each html page should have its own meta description and title tag for SEO, as well as be placed into the existing interface template. So maybe this is too much to ask for a converter or script. Gotta go manual input? Thanks.

[JustinW]

With this in mind, how to online newspapers do daily articles? Do they manually edit in the text, meta data and title tags into their newspaper templates for each page every day, or is there some sort of CMS that lets the writers or editors update their columns without really knowing much html? If there is a CMS it probably is very expensive. I have 40,000 book pages to upload in a one time shot so it is enough to be a hassle but not much of a budget to afford expensive software.

[slaughters]

Another thought.

I know there are programs out there designed to convert text files into multiple individual image files. You specify the number of lines you want on a page and they create sequential images out of them.

http://www.merlinsoftware.com/ebook/index.htm

http://neamar.free.fr/txt2jpg_en/Telecharger.php

http://www.zune-online.com/news/zune/jpegbook-read-your-books-on-zune.html