The main draw back to mantisbible.com in allowing easy addition of other works into the mantis "shell" would be that you don't receive any revenue. For instance, currently, you charge a couple bucks for Charles Shedd's In His Steps. There are no digital rights issues to this document. It has been copyright free from the time it was first published, as Mr. Shedd explains in his preface to the edition you make available. And there are, as the reply above points out, hundreds of titles available through Gutenberg copyright free. Personally, I get my literature from manybooks.net. For mantis to be usable as a reader, you would need to develop a converter app that would reside on a desktop/laptop, or perhaps on the iPT/iP. This converter app would allow a user to point it to a file on the desktop/laptop hardrive and convert that into a document that mantis would receive by webDav, or some other synching feature. mantisbible.com would, of course, charge some few or several bucks for the convertor app. And this would add to your revenue stream. It might make up in some small way for the loss you would see as people converted their own text documents into a mantis document. Should you do this, I will make a couple suggestions. Allow the user to designate chapter breaks and such. The convertor app for Stanza doesnt do this and the breaks you end up with make no sense. Also, allow the person making the conversion to hyperlink the text. Though this may actually by what takes place with the cross-referencing capabilities of mantis as you explained to me in another post of mine. As a way to "grow" the mantisbible.com websites library of texts, anytime someone converts a text to mantis, make the convertor send a copy to mantisbible.com. If the document is a copyright free document, then include it on your website for download for a small cost, like In His Steps. Of course you will want the person making the conversion to know that they are relinquishing all rights to the document they have converted, ie, the conversion is not "theirs," but is in fact the copyrighted property of mantisbible.com, but they have a limited license to use it. I think, as I said, Mantis is the best reader available. I would love to use it for all my reading so I can keep notes and cross references between and among my reading in one easy to find place. You could keep you product evangelical, as well, even if it were sold to someone who only wanted to use it as a general reader. Make it so the KJV of the Bible is automatically installed and can't be removed. Then, further, until they spend, say, 10 hours using the installed Bible, or until they install another version, make the KJV open each and everytime to John 3:16. |