On Sun, Aug 09, 2009 at 10:00:23PM +0200, Marcello Perathoner wrote:
Greg Newby wrote:
A more general approach would be to let visitors to www.gutenberg.org put their selected files (including those generated on-the-fly) on a bookshelf (i.e., shopping cart), then download in one big file, or several small ones.
Or we could tell them how to use the download manager in their browsers ...
Seriously, whenever I download a couple of books, I just click away and let the downloads complete in the background.
A bookshelf (or shopping cart, or call it something else) isn't just about managing downloads started immediately upon finding something of interest. It's about keeping track of books to download in the future, books already downloaded, and books to start downloading later (say, overnight or when someone goes from home to a location with higher bandwidth). Sure, people can use browser bookmarks for some of this, but: - bookmarks need to then be managed, for after the book is downloaded - bookmarking the bibrec page is easy, but right-click "bookmark target as..." to actually select a file format is harder for our many naive users - A larger # of bookmarks for future reading won't have very useful functionality; a shopping cart model at www.gutenberg.org could have some more useful features Probably another site will implement this for the Gutenberg content, eventually. Some of the resellers already have this type of thing. -- Greg PS: I really like adding an m3u playlist file to audio content
I concur that there has something to be done for the audio files. Even just clicking on 10+ files can be bothersome.
But I always favor the lowest-tech solution.
So why not add a M3U playlist to the directory? M3U just a text file with a list of urls and is supported by Winamp and many other players.