Online Books Tracker Planning

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Motivation

I recall once seeing a comprehensive list of Online Computer Books. However, I misplaced the link and Google is no help. Furthermore, I recall several additions I sent were not incorporated there due to lack of time by the maintainers. I'd like to resurrect such a list of online books (computer or otherwise), but in a more scalable manner.

What I envision is a sort of a Wiki-like site only with structured database data instead of free form text. Everyone will be able to add new book entries, or modify them. The changes and history however will be recorded and presented to the users using a recent changes page, and RSS feeds. (and possibly even E-mail).

Some operations will be reserved to admins. Such are deprecation of entries, approving of categories (see below) additions, etc. And administrators will be able to cancel the changes done by regular users or other admins.

The Database Schema

Each book entry will contain the following information:

  • Title
  • Link to the book
  • Authors - either a free form entry or a list of individual authors.
  • Formats - multiple choice of:
    • HTML
    • PDF
    • PostScript
    • troff
    • TeX/LaTeX
    • DocBook
    • MS Word
    • Plaintext
    • Perl POD
    • Texinfo
    • WordPerfect
    • OpenOffice SXW
    • OpenDocument (OASIS Standard)
    • Other XML-based format.
    • Other
  • Original Language - choice of English, Spanish, French, etc.
  • Translations - select all that apply.
  • Topics - this will supply a tree of topics, with admins being able to change it. A book may be categorized into more than one topic.
  • License - choice of the:
    • Creative Commons licenses
    • GNU Free Documentation License
    • Open Publication License
    • Other Open Content License
    • Free for reading.
    • Public Domain.
    • Placed under an Open-Source License traditionally intended for software.
    • Other options... ?
  • Abstract
  • Year of Writing/Publication
  • Publisher
  • Last updated on...
  • Others... ?


All the book entries can be placed in their own table. The topics will form a tree and will likely require their own table. There should be another table for 1-to-many associations of books to topics.

There would be another table keeping historical records of books.

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