Opportunities for topic maps as stand alone information products.
The Kobo eReader has 1 GB of storage standard and holds up to 1,000 titles. Topic maps for either for content navigation in general or particular books. A topic map of Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” might excite one of my college English professors, I don’t think it would be a real “hot” number in terms of sales. (Austen’s work is the default on the advertising I get at Border’s. Your display may be different.) For further information, Kobo Developer Program
Kindle (Amazon product) is another option. I would put in a link to their developer resources but all the strings have tracking information embedded in them. Just go to Amazon and follow the links to the Kindle resources. (A simple link to developer resources would be nice, just in case you know someone at Amazon.)
Or Lulu, a traditional print-on-demand/ebook publisher, has released LuLu for Developers. The LuLu company profile points out that in 2008, there were 276,489 books traditionally published in the United States. LuLu alone published 400,000 titles last year. Perhaps not every title merits a topic map but what if you created a topic map for a group of titles? That would promote sales of the titles as a group and be a value add to users.
Suppose I should also mention iPad Apps. Since I don’t have a cell phone, much less an iPhone, this one would be a really steep learning curve for me. Please post pointers to anyone developing topic maps for the iPad.
I haven’t tried one of these eformats with topic maps (yet) but suspect that once a book is “in” any of the formats, reliable pointing into them will be possible.
Imagine the “truth squads” who would want sell their “version” along side popular books. And then responses, using your topic map to reply to the first response.
tmjs (http://github.com/jansc/tmjs) is a Topic Maps engine written in pure JavaScript. It should work perfectly on an iPad, iPhone or Android phone though I haven’t tried it myself.
Comment by Jan Schreiber — May 19, 2010 @ 1:35 am
Jan, thanks! Maybe someone with an iPad, iPhone or Android phone can post a report.
Comment by Patrick Durusau — May 19, 2010 @ 4:33 am