Digital Book Repository

Abstract

Digital books revolutionized the dissemination of knowledge all over the world, just like the printing press. A whole library has come down to one electronic gadget. The age of searching through dusty library shelves for books to find one piece of information is long gone. Now, one can access hundreds of resources on almost any subject with a single click or by using search engines. The time needed to find resources in a library could be enough to find, examine, and critically analyze the same information. With the digitization of books, piracy is also a major issue in third world countries like Pakistan where there is no such check and balance. Books are scanned and made publicly available in pdf across the internet. Due to this trend, people have stopped purchasing books, resulting in loss to all the stakeholders (sellers, writers, and publishers). Whereas, Western societies have digitized their books and saved their intellectual heritage for coming generations. They have made an alternate platform for all the stakeholders with a proper system of check and balance. Unfortunately, such efforts were lacking in our society. The students of COMSATS University Islamabad, Lahore (FA16) took an initiative named Digital Book Repository (DBR), to save our cultural heritage by digitizing Urdu Books. They made an online bookstore like Amazon Books, but specifically for local Urdu Books. They also developed a PDF reader that allows the user to only open and read the books that were bought by the user through their online bookstore. The scope of the Digital Book Repository (DBR) is limited to an online store and a PDF reader for desktop. The basic purpose of our project was to upgrade the already built online store and develop a PDF reader for Android and IOS. Our PDF reader allows the user to open and read the book from only the first three devices (Desktop or Mobile) with which the user opens the book. The user will only be successful in opening the book if the user is logged in from the same email-id with which it bought the book.