[gui-talk] the new and improved bookshare.org

[Raul A. Gallegos]

Hello. The bks format was their own proprietary format AFAIK. However 
.zip has always had password encryption in addition to the compression 
so this is nothing new. Back in the early 90s when i used pkzip and 
pkunzip from dos, it too had encryption via password. Winzip, and my 
favorite, 7-zip has it too. So it's quite normal.

Hope this helps.

Joel Deutsch wrote the following on 1/21/2009 11:14 AM:

> L.
> 
> I'm not a Bookshare person now, although I might jhoin in future. Two things 
> you said confused me. I hope you'll explain.
> 
> You say that the book files used to be "encrypted" as .bks files, and now 
> they're encrypted as .zip files. Well, I'm unfamiliar with the first file 
> extension, so I can't guess if that means how a single book or group of 
> books is downloaded, or whether what's downloaded has to be extracted then.
> 
> But I know that .zip files are generally not an encryption method but rather 
> file compression to make a package smaller, and that you have to simply 
> unzip (unpack) that in order to have all the compressed files extract 
> themselves and be ready to use.
> 
> So is the first extension you minion actually a proprirateary file type, as 
> .obx is for Open Book, for instance, and you need a special reader to make 
> use of them? Same way you need a copy of Open Book to access an .obx file? 
> Or is it a compression type I just haven't heard of?
> 
> And is the .zip extension used by Booshare for encryption  in some way that 
> I never heard about regarding the uses of the .zip method?
> 
> Thanks a lot. you might guess, correctly, that I'm so ignorant about how 
> Bookshare works that I thought its inventory consisted simply of scanned 
> text files that you downloaded as they were or maybe as .zip files and then 
> extracted to use them. i guess it's more complicated, what with these 
> additional file types, such as  .css, that you mention being involved, too.
-- 
Raul A. Gallegos -- http://www.asmodean.net


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