Local hosting of a web site

[STEMPublishing]

Hi all - from the latest newbie!

Please excuse me - I am an amateur on forums and with ebooks.

I have a website on which I have published, for the last 15 years, 10s of 1000s of Christian books and articles.

I have been interested for some years in the possibility of using eReaders for users in poor countries in the middle of Africa etc., in such places to be able to carry a library in lightweight form and read it in daylight  with no paper for the ants to eat and the humidity to spoil seems too good to be true!

To retrospectively format 10s of 1000s of html files to some ebook formats is too much for me.

So I have been waiting for the excellent Sony devices to have a browser along with its touch screen - hurray for the PRS-T1 !!!!

I presume the kludgy Kindle will be catching up this Autumn.

I want to be able to offer folk a download of my site  (a few hundred Mb of text) to their eReader so that they can access it all in the structure of the site without 3G access and without creating 10s of 1000s of eBooks and the necessary links around them.

Is there anyone out there with the expertise/knowledge who would know if the browser will access material locally on the reader?

What is necessary for it to do that?

...anything else I should know?

I would very much appreciate any help....

Thanks, Les.

Message was edited by: -Soup-

[STEMPublishing]

I should add that the html files are 99.99% text with minimal formatting, very few having some B&W charts in them. They should be easy candidates for eReading - word wrap, scrolling viewing.

[carpetmojo · Accepted solution]

I would respectfully suggest  - with all present technologies I know of, anyway - that ereader robustness, of whatever manufacturer - will prove to be a problem.

Certainly covers/cases would be a must in the situations you envisage, and power for recharging batteries vital.

In the situations you envisage, these could prove real stumbling blocks.

But good luck.

[STEMPublishing]

Thank you for your reply above - now 6 months ago - since then we have painfully made many ebook collections of my site - each ebook is a collection of articles/books in order to get another level of cataloguing into the device. I have bought now nearly 20 Sony e-readers for trial in jungle situations. They are going out from this month, though one went to India 6 months ago to a rapturous reception!

Your advice about covers was VERY helpful, cheap covers ~£3 will do the job - though rubbish compared with £24 one I was given - beautiful leather - am I allowed to mention brand names...

Similarly your advice about batteries has been exercising me - I was investigating the possibility of 'natives' making* cheaply small solar panels (from broken pieces) with limiting diodes etc., USB connection for charging off the mains. However my need has been anticipated and there are now a variety of solar chargers available with most of the problems sorted! From a price of ~£10 - so for the mobility that they give this is just great! I have sent a charger out this week 🙂

*This would be a possible source of income in such poor places. But mass manufacturing seems to put the skids under this idea - just as it did to OLPC 😞

I still hanker after local hosting of a web site on the e-reader - this method of navigating a collection of html books (as per my site) would be brilliant! When one is putting a library of reference books on one of these devices there needs to be a much more sophisticated index/TOC for users. Surely if local-hosting is going to happen Sony device are the ones to do it - because the other major makers are actually book-sellers and have a vested interest in keeping folk in their store - I very much hope this does not undermine Sony's class-leading efforts!

Thanks again for your advice, Les.