Are there plans for a collaborative website of ‘Bloom Outputs’ (mainly .bloomd files but also for PDFs) where the actual ebooks / PDFs could be searched, downloaded, uploaded and shared?
The current Bloom library is only accessible to those with computers and the Bloom program, but it seems like book distribution would be much easier with a mobile phone friendly website where readers could browse, filter by language etc., and download .bloomd books straight to their Bloom Reader App from their phones (without needing to go through someone with a computer to get more books).
I’ve wondered about setting up a website, but the trouble is that most standard websites (e.g. Wix, Squarespace, etc.) don’t recognise the .bloomd file format so the books can’t be uploaded & downloaded.
To start with it could just be something like a supported Google Drive shared folder system (e.g. folders by language) where Bloom users could deposit their ebooks (.bloomd files) - like a useable archive?
I’m just wondering if others have developed ways to share books this way, or where to point readers to for more books to add to the Bloom Reader App?
Hi Angie,
We often say things like “there are plans for X”, but I fear that can be misleading. What we mean is that we agree that X is needed and we want to do it. But the amount of such “plans” dwarfs the size of our team.
A major revamp of bloomlibrary which includes the things you’ve listed is one of those things that we would really like to do.
OK, you mention various ways that you could create your own web site for distributing Bloom Reader files. This should work pretty well, with one proviso. When a user downloads a .bloomd from your site using their phone’s browser, the phone should then recognize that .bloomd belongs to Bloom Reader and open it. However this is an area where some Android phones have a problem, this linkage between “.bloomd” and our app. You’d want to test it out.
In the case that the phone doesn’t just automatically run Bloom Reader with the downloaded book, the fallback option is to run BR and give the command to “Find books on this device”, and it will locate the downloaded book and move it into the right place so it is then always available in BR’s list of books. This is obviously not a great user experience, we know, but we are currently limited by bugs in various Android phones.