Free Menestrello
RSS • Permalink • Created 24 Nov 2014 • Written by Alberto Pettarin
IMPORTANT UPDATE (2015-05-25): The source code of the app, now called Minstrel, has been published on GitHub under the MIT License. ReadBeyond will continue to maintain an official stable release of the app, under the original name Menestrello. See the official Web page for details. (The text below is kept in its original form for archival purposes. Links might be broken now.)
In case you missed the official announcement, my company ReadBeyond is committed to release the source code of our app Menestrello, under the liberal, business-friendly Apache license.
In short, we want to create the "Mozilla Firefox of eBook reading apps", borrowing Baldur Bjarnason's words. (See also my previous post on this subject.)
Toward this goal, we seek financial support to speed up some code refactoring/documentation work that is needed before pushing the code base to GitHub.
All the details can be read at the following URL: http://www.readbeyond.it/freemenestrello/.
(Feel free to spread the word, it will be much appreciated!)
The FAQs contain a lot of useful bits of information about our vision on the project goals and issues. If you want to get a flavor of of the code quality we are aiming for, there is also a link to the documentation and source code of our pure JS EPUB parser, which is used in the app.
Let me just emphasize here the fact that we are already working on the app source code in our spare time, and eventually we will publish it (unless ReadBeyond goes out-of-business before, of course). This micro fundraising phase is simply meant to allow us to dedicate some of our (mostly, my) working time to this project, now.
Feel free to contact us (or me directly) for any questions, concerns, or suggestions you might have.
I promise to soon post a much longer article on this project, its goals and on why I believe in the importance of (reading) apps for the entire (digital) reading/learning ecosystem.
Finally, I want to thank the individuals and companies/institutions that have already expressed support for this project.