Searchable eBooks Website - Text or DB?

Anon

I am working on a website that will contain books to be read on line. I want the books to searchable and the display of the books to be spread on pages (next, prev, and jump to page🙂. Also, when someone searches the books on the website, I would like the results to point to the page that the word(s) appear in, and when the result is viewed, the words would be highlighted.

I am going to use PHP/MySQL. What I want to know is the best way to store the books. I was thinking of having a table in the DB for the books' pages as follows:

Pages:
book_id
page_num
content

Would this be better or should I use text files instead? and why?

Also is there a ready made free solution for me out there? Is there an article that can help me?

Thanks,
Yahya

[deleted]

Textfiles or database blobs does not matter too much for performance,blobs are easier to use online, but textfiles are much easier to edit/update/backup/restore.

I suggest you keep the 'originals' in textfiles, and load copies into the database.

As for the searching and printing in pages, that's all been discussed in the forums, look for the article called 'slapping together a search engine'

I suggest you start by making it work before you worry about highlighting search-results etc.

A forum, a FAQ, what else do you need?

Time to YAPF!: http://www.hvt-automation.nl/yapf/

Anon

Thanks Vincent

But I still want to know if seperating the books content into pages is a good idea (each page is in a separate record) or should I keep each book's contenet in one record.

The library will have hundreds of books ranging from 30 pages to 2000 pages.

I printed the suggested article and will read it now.

[deleted]

Look at it this way:

Using one recod per book:
if a book is 2000 pages, that's 2000 x 2kBytes, that's 4Megabytes.
So every time a user requests one page, you have to read 4MB from the database, chop it into pages, get the page the ures wants, and print it.

Using one record per page:
2000 pages is 2000 records, but if the user wants a particular page, you only have to get the record for that page and print it.

Another thing to remember is that if you store the books in single records, you cannot count the pages, you cannot do a simple LIKE search (for ex: to find all occurences of 'poo' in pages 50 through 100 from book 5) becuase a) you don't know where those pages are in the record, and b) you don't want to have to read all 4MB just to search 100k worth of data.

A forum, a FAQ, what else do you need?

Time to YAPF!: http://www.hvt-automation.nl/yapf/

Anon

Thanks for the tip Vincent,

The article was good and well help me in what I'm trying to do.

Yahya

Anon

I've been trying to do a parser that reads an HTML file (containing pages of a book) and insert into a database. Assuming the HTML file has the pages separated by a horizontal line (<hr>).

database used in my project is really simple, a book card table and pages table, your second approach Yahya.

Yahya, are you reading from a file or using wysiwyg editor to enter the pages?

anyhelp with parser? 🙂

Ghost.