EPUB-Search

Search engine for digital publication based on EPUB 3

Welcome! EPUB-Search makes your digital publications searchable.

What is the use case:

• Server-side microservice to search for browser-based “cloud” readers within EPUBs
• For EPUBs that lives online
• To search within your local EPUB-stock

Online Demo

Demo

Features included:

• Full text search (get all query matches for one epub-document or for a whole epub collection)
• Autocomplete
• Full javascript
• Hits including cfi references
• Response results in JSON format
• Pre-indexing
• Indexing on-the-fly

Installation

For CLI use

[sudo] npm install epub-full-text-search -g

For library use

$ npm install epub-full-text-search --save

Running as a Service

CLI

$ epub-search 

Welcome to Epub search service

Usage: epub-search [action] [options]

Actions:
        start           Start the service
        stop            Stop the service
        logs            Show logs
        writeToIndex    Epub-book(s) which should be written to index.(Hint: the epub content have to be unzipped)

Options:
        -p      Path to epub folder which contains epub-book(s).

Start Service

$ [sudo] epub-search start

Modus operandi

EPUB search provides two modus operandi:

• The first one is Indexing On-the-fly. This means the ebook will be indexed in the background when it gets opened. The assumption for this mode is the EPUB3-book which is remote available. The generated search-index will be deleted if the ebook is closed.

• The second one is Pre-Indexing. This means all ebooks on the local machine can be indexed and the generated search index will be persistent available during all reading sessions. So it possible the search terms within all indexed ebooks.

Indexing On-the-fly

Indexing

http://localhost:8085/addToIndex?url=${epub}/&uuid=${uuid}

Search

http://localhost:8085/search?q=${term}&uuid=${uuid}

Delete index

http://localhost:8085/deleteFromIndex?&uuid=${uuid}

Pre-Indexing

Indexing

Let´s start to index some EPUBs:

$ epub-search writeToIndex -p  <path>

Search

Search for term:

http://localhost:8085/search?q=${term}&t=${EPUB-title};

Suggestions for Autocomplete

$  http://localhost:8085/matcher?beginsWith=beginning-of-the-text-to-match

Examples:

Indexing On-the-fly

TODO

Pre-indexing

At first, please install epub-search globally:

[sudo] npm install epub-full-text-search -g

Start service:

$ [sudo] epub-search start

Add sample epubs to index:

epub-search writeToIndex -p {prefix}/node_modules/epub-full-text-search/node_modules/epub3-samples

Now we should get some hits for the term epub:

_{For requests you can use $ curl -XGET "http://localhost:8085/search?q=math" or the browser...}

Search within the whole ebook-collection:

http://localhost:8085/search?q=math

Set the filter for the book-title t="..." to search only within a specific ebook:

http://localhost:8085/search?q=epub&t=Accessible+EPUB+3

Or we can get some suggestions for an autocomplete:

http://localhost:8085/matcher?beginsWith=epu

For library use

TODO

Hit data format

TODO

Local testing

Install all dependent modules: npm install.

Start up the demo npm run start. It should run an express server on your local machine.

When you are navigating to http://localhost:8085/ you can see the demo?.

Note: The pre-indexing process starts automatically and it takes a few seconds until the pre-indexing search is available.

Technical Details

EPUB-Search uses search-index to indexing book content.

Contributing

Very welcome ... :-)