Thanks indeed for the detailed infos.
 //The app will also be available on F-Droid.// Waiting ...
As an Indian, I have to say "One more hurdle for Learning ...". I hope that
we will get International support.

On Mon, 31 Mar 2025 at 17:46, Bodhisattwa <[email protected]>
wrote:

> Hello Wikisourcerers,
>
> We have some announcements to make from our end related to the Wikisource
> reader app.
>
>
>    -
>
>    The Wikisource reader app entirely depends on the WS-export
>    <https://ws-export.wmcloud.org/> tool while downloading the books. As
>    the maintainers of the WS-export tool are currently working to make it more
>    robust and dependable than before, we have decided to wait for them to
>    finish their work and slightly postpone the launch of the app on play
>    stores for everyone to use.
>    -
>
>    CIS-A2K has sponsored the development of the app. As some of you might
>    know from recent official communications coming from them that they are
>    recently in a critical situation. That jeopardises the future maintenance
>    of the app for the next few years. We have explored a few stable Wikimedia
>    affiliates from different parts of the world who can host and help maintain
>    the app in upcoming years, but as we have received repeated assurances from
>    the current leadership of CIS-A2K team, the app will be hosted by them
>    under their play store account for now, until it cannot be sustained there.
>    The app will also be available on F-Droid.
>    -
>
>    We have worked on a few improvements including fetching titles and
>    thumbnails, localising language names, improving text selection options,
>    etc.
>    -
>
>       For titles, as discussed on the Meta-Wiki talk page, the app will
>       query in the following manner,
>       -
>
>          Title (P1476 <https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P1476>) in
>          native language
>          -
>
>          label in native language, if the above is not present
>          -
>
>          label in multiple language (mul), if the above is not present
>          -
>
>       For thumbnails, the app will query in the following manner
>       -
>
>          Image (P18 <https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P18>)
>          -
>
>          title page number (P4714
>          <https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P4714>) qualifier used
>          in P996 <https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P996>, if the
>          above is not present
>          -
>
>    Apart from the existing language support for Bangla, English, French,
>    Hindi, Marathi, Punjabi, Spanish, Tamil, Telugu, we have added Assamese,
>    Indonesian and Malay after getting requests from some of the participants
>    of the Wikisource conference speaking these languages. The app interface is
>    also available in all these languages to some extent.
>    -
>
>    We are also working towards localisation of the app, however it will
>    require some time from our end to host the strings on TranslateWiki.
>    Meanwhile, you can reach out to us if you are interested in assisting us
>    with localisation.
>    -
>
>    Now that the core development is done, future work will be done
>    voluntarily. We are more than happy to invite the Wikimedia developer
>    community to send bug reports
>    <https://github.com/cis-india/Wikisource-Reader/issues>, fixes, and
>    features. We are also looking forward to including app related development
>    in upcoming hackathons and internships.
>    -
>
>    We will also be publishing some tutorials and guides to easily
>    structure wikidata items related to works on Wikisource. We hope the
>    community takes interest in improving Wikidata items so that we can bring
>    more works into the app and also into broader access.
>    -
>
>    The app now lists 6,577 completed works in 12 languages 🎉
>    -
>
>       Assamese - 23
>       -
>
>       Bangla - 457
>       -
>
>       English - 1785
>       -
>
>       French - 3690
>       -
>
>       Hindi - 1
>       -
>
>       Indonesian - 21
>       -
>
>       Malay - 9
>       -
>
>       Marathi - 65
>       -
>
>       Punjabi - 23
>       -
>
>       Spanish - 345
>       -
>
>       Telugu - 77
>       -
>
>       Tamil - 81
>
>
> Regards,
>
> Bodhisattwa and Sai Phanindra
>
>
> On Sun, 2 Feb 2025 at 09:49, Bodhisattwa <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>
>> Hello Wikisourcerers,
>>
>> Thanks to Sai's commitment, we have successfully switched to a new reader
>> this week and have resolved most of the rendering issues we were having
>> with the last reader. The new reader is rendering the Wikisource stylings
>> as they are. This new reader also comes with a wide range of other features
>> to improve reader experience like search, navigation, highlight, bookmark,
>> underline, annotation, font color options, font size options, font weight
>> options, text normalisation, theme color options, image color inversion,
>> page margin options, different font options, RTL support etc.
>>
>> We have also included two more languages into the app as pilot i.e.
>> Spanish and Marathi based on their recent contributions to the Wikidata
>> items for book editions following the FRBR book model used in
>> Wikidata:Books and app workflow. Special thanks to Ignacio, Subodh, Ashwini
>> for the valuable contributions on Wikidata.
>>
>> This is also a gentle reminder that the community conversation hour will
>> happen today at 12:00 noon UTC as mentioned in the previous email.
>>
>> See you all there,
>>
>> Regards,
>> Bodhisattwa
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Thu, 23 Jan 2025 at 12:19, Bodhisattwa <[email protected]>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Hello Wikisourcerers,
>>>
>>> Thank you for all your feedback here, on meta-wiki and on telegram
>>> channels. We are keeping note of all of them and having discussions on them
>>> internally.
>>>
>>> Our current e-book reader, which we are using in the app, has many
>>> limitations and does not render the stylings used in Wikisource properly.
>>> So, we are replacing it with another open-source ebook reader which has a
>>> variety of features and can overcome those limitations. It will take us a
>>> few more days to update the new code on Github. For this reason, we are
>>> postponing the conversation hour to 2nd February, same time.
>>>
>>>
>>>    - *Next community conversation hour*
>>>    - Sunday, 2 February 12:00 – 13:00 UTC
>>>       - Video call link: https://meet.google.com/khd-qvfy-nsr
>>>
>>>
>>> Andy, we intend to give a demonstration of the app at the upcoming
>>> Wikisource conference and we have already requested for a small slot in the
>>> session to do that, but it is up to the conference program team to decide
>>> as the program submission deadline is already closed. Anyway, if it is not
>>> possible through official sessions, we can always demo at the meetups or
>>> outside official conference sessions.
>>>
>>> Regards,
>>> Bodhisattwa
>>>
>>> On Sat, 18 Jan 2025 at 07:32, Sam Wilson <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>
>>>> This app looks great! Very exciting.
>>>>
>>>> On the topic of OPDS: there was some experimenting a few years ago with
>>>> the OPDS feeds that ws-export currently produces, and the open source
>>>> FBReader app which supports them: https://fbreader.org/book-sources
>>>>
>>>> The main issues seemed to be around the actual navigation of the
>>>> catalogue (people generally don't want to browse books alphabetically
>>>> by
>>>> title!). And that when OPDS feeds get too big they should ideally be
>>>> broken up into subsidiary ones (e.g. by topic, for non-fiction, or
>>>> genre
>>>> for fiction). But those are not too hard to solve, and it does sound
>>>> like building them from Wikidata data would be better (although I know
>>>> there are disagreements about how much cataloguing to have on Wikidata
>>>> vs Wikisource — that some Wikisources don't want topic, genre etc. to
>>>> be
>>>> decided by Wikidata).
>>>>
>>>> There are various issues still with ws-export's stability, and
>>>> reliability for exporting large or image-heavy books. I'm hoping to
>>>> work
>>>> on some of that this month (or rather, upgrade it to Symfony 7 first
>>>> and
>>>> then work on that stuff). I wonder if we should be looking again at
>>>> caching the fully-generated epubs too (although that implies having
>>>> fewer build-time options maybe).
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On 18/1/25 01:22, [email protected] wrote:
>>>> > [picked the wrong mailing list the first time, sorry for that]
>>>> >
>>>> >
>>>> > This is amazing! Congrats to the team.
>>>> >
>>>> > Magnus is raising a good point (thanks!), there is a standard API to
>>>> integrate catalog into epub reader apps. It's called OPDS [1] and some
>>>> Wikisource(s) publishes one [2] since a decade. However, it's not very user
>>>> friendly and we never made outreach to integrate it natively into apps so
>>>> it's not much used. This OPDS feed is not based on Wikidata but on metadata
>>>> present inside of Wikisource.
>>>> >
>>>> > I still think having our own Wikisource branded app is relevant for
>>>> outreach and visibility, maybe building on OPDS instead of doing something
>>>> bespoke would allow to reuse even more code?
>>>> >
>>>> > Congrats again,
>>>> >
>>>> > Thomas
>>>> >
>>>> > [1] https://specs.opds.io/
>>>> > [2] https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Help:OPDS
>>>> >
>>>> >> Le vendredi 17 janvier 2025 à 15:37, Magnus Manske <
>>>> [email protected]> a écrit :
>>>> >>
>>>> >>> This is great!
>>>> >>>
>>>> >>> Silly question: Considering that the reader app will display epub
>>>> format, is there no existing (open source) epub reader app that could use
>>>> Wikisource as a, well, source? I would be surprised if there is not a
>>>> single app where you can set/add an API URL, we would just have to be
>>>> compatible with that API spec.
>>>> >>>
>>>> >>> This could avoid a whole load of development and technical debt.
>>>> >>>
>>>> >>> On Fri, Jan 17, 2025 at 7:07 AM Bodhisattwa <
>>>> [email protected]> wrote:
>>>> >>>
>>>> >>>> Hello Wikisourcerers,
>>>> >>>>
>>>> >>>> We are excited to announce that we have been developing a
>>>> Wikisource reader app for Android mobile users for the last three months
>>>> and the beta version of the app is almost ready for testing. The
>>>> development of the mobile app was a much-awaited request from the
>>>> Wikisource community and when fully released, hopefully, it will help bring
>>>> more readers to Wikisource platforms.
>>>> >>>>
>>>> >>>> Necessary links of the reader app
>>>> >>>>
>>>> >>>> -   A documentation page is in draft on meta wiki here -
>>>> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikisource_reader_app
>>>> >>>> -   The Github repo of the code is here -
>>>> https://github.com/cis-india/Wikisource-Reader
>>>> >>>>
>>>> >>>> Wikidata integration
>>>> >>>>
>>>> >>>> We have been using the FRBR data model used in the Wikidata
>>>> WikiProject Books to handle the descriptive metadata needed for filtering
>>>> and categorizing the contents of the app. To be included in the app, an
>>>> edition should have
>>>> >>>>
>>>> >>>> -   fully proofread or validated
>>>> >>>> -   transcluded into the main namespace or NS:0
>>>> >>>> -   a Wikidata item with descriptive metadata property like title,
>>>> author etc.
>>>> >>>> -   Wikisource index page url (P1957) property linked with that
>>>> item
>>>> >>>> -   Wikisource sitelink for the NS:0 transcluded page linked with
>>>> that item
>>>> >>>> -   a proofread and/or validated badge linked with that sitelink.
>>>> >>>>
>>>> >>>> Here are a few example of the book editions which are included in
>>>> the app
>>>> >>>>
>>>> >>>> -   An example of a Bangla book edition is this one
>>>> >>>> -   A list of all French books to be included in the app can be
>>>> found here - https://w.wiki/CkMP
>>>> >>>>
>>>> >>>> Pilot languages and API
>>>> >>>>
>>>> >>>> In the beta version, we have piloted with English, French and
>>>> Bangla as these three languages are storing their metadata on Wikidata. We
>>>> will roll out for other languages gradually. An API was built using Django
>>>> and deployed on Toolforge which serves a catalogue of books following the
>>>> data model described above. It periodically runs a set of SPARQL queries to
>>>> retrieve data, processes that data and updates the database.
>>>> >>>>
>>>> >>>> -   Link - https://wsindex.toolforge.org/books/
>>>> >>>> -   Repo - https://codeberg.org/ph4ni/wsindex
>>>> >>>>
>>>> >>>> Features
>>>> >>>>
>>>> >>>> We have decided to display the books in epub format which will be
>>>> generated through WS-export tool. Any issues related to epub generation can
>>>> be reported here.
>>>> >>>>
>>>> >>>> Right now, the following features are available
>>>> >>>>
>>>> >>>> 1.  Browse through a list of works which are completely proofread
>>>> or validated.
>>>> >>>> 2.  Filter based on the language or literary form of your choice.
>>>> >>>> 3.  Search for books by title or author.
>>>> >>>> 4.  Download books to your local device for offline access.
>>>> >>>> 5.  Share links to the Wikisource page of each book.
>>>> >>>> 6.  Read, delete, and track completion percentage of books in your
>>>> local library.
>>>> >>>> 7.  Change font size, look up words, and access a dictionary.
>>>> >>>> 8.  Switch between dark and light themes for comfortable reading.
>>>> >>>> 9.  Use the app in multiple languages.
>>>> >>>>
>>>> >>>> Currently, we are working on the following areas
>>>> >>>>
>>>> >>>> -   Internal epub reader which can render the styling of the
>>>> contents as much as possible
>>>> >>>> -   Design of the contents and metadata within the app
>>>> >>>> -   Fixes here and there
>>>> >>>>
>>>> >>>> Next steps
>>>> >>>>
>>>> >>>>
>>>> >>>> In coming days, we will
>>>> >>>>
>>>> >>>> -   start conversation with the Wikisource communities to make
>>>> aware about the app, share the workflow needed to include contents there
>>>> and get feedback for further development. (We had one call with the Marathi
>>>> Wikisource community already).
>>>> >>>>
>>>> >>>> -   Next community conversation hour
>>>> >>>>
>>>> >>>> -   Sunday, 26 January 12:00 – 13:00 UTC
>>>> >>>> -   Video call link: https://meet.google.com/khd-qvfy-nsr
>>>> >>>>
>>>> >>>> -   discuss with all stakeholders regarding necessary steps.
>>>> >>>> -   register for Google Play Store and release the stable version
>>>> of the app there
>>>> >>>> -   release the app in other play stores gradually.
>>>> >>>>
>>>> >>>> We would like to specially thank Sai Phanindra, who has developed
>>>> the app as an assignment from CIS-A2K.
>>>> >>>>
>>>> >>>> Regards,
>>>> >>>> Bodhisattwa
>>>> >>>> (Part-time consultant, CIS-A2K)
>>>> >>>> _______________________________________________
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