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Our school has some ebooks.
We want to build a server, to allow our students to login and read those ebooks online; we also want our students to be able to highlight some text in order to comment and ask questions, so other students and teachers can review and answer.
Are there any solutions?
Calibre has a builtin server that can allow you to share your ebooks over the internet.
From the user manual:
Start Content server: Starts calibre’s built-in web server. When started, your calibre library will be accessible via a web browser from the Internet (if you choose). You can configure how the web server is accessed by setting preferences at
Preferences→Sharing→Sharing over the net
Of course, you are responsible for every copyright issue that might arise, this is just a technical way to perform a task; it is your responsibility to check if you have the rights to share those books with other people.
This way, you can share the ebook files, that every user will have to download and read with his own device/software. A direct tighter collaboration like you are asking (i.e. shared annotations and comments) is not possible with this method, every user will be reading on his own device with a different copy of the ebook file, but you can use some free online tool like Google Keep, Simplenote, Trello, or something similar to set up a workspace to share notes and thoughts, if you take care to reference the ebook/chapter/section you are discussing about.
Another possible solution is to use a Social Network dedicated to books, like Goodreads, and create a private group to discuss
BookFusion is an open and global eBook platform that allows schools to create their own private/public libraries to facilitate controlled lending and distribution of eBooks of various formats including audio-books, video embedded ebooks, interactive ebooks
The students are able to highlight and make comments. However, the feature that allows teachers and other students to respond to comments and questions will not be released until a later date. This will be possible when we release Branch(social aspect of our platform)
You can learn more about our eBook platform for Education at https://www.bookfusion.com/education
Simply signup and refer this question on StackExchange
Disclaimer: I am the founder of BookFusion.
