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For years I had this idea of ebook library management web app. I've actually started it already about 3 years ago but HD i had it on crashed and the testing server I had it on got stolen (talk about having to triple backup everything XD) so I have nothing to show :( Since codebase was so horrible I wanted to start over anyway but then wondering if I should waste time since there are so many document and ebook management web apps out there already and I am not sure if any of my ideas are original or otherwise useful.

The primary goal is the ability for an ebook to be in more than one category. So for example, C++ GUI Programming with Qt4 belongs to C++ language, C++ gui development and GUI development categories so navigation tree looks something like

library
 |->programming
       |
       |->languages
              |->C++
                  |->C++ GUI Programming with Qt4
       |-> GUI development
                 |->C++ GUI Programming with Qt4  

This avoids any book to be "unfairly" categorized in one place and not be noticed when browsing the tree (for example if I am looking for any book dealing with GUI). To achieve this I was thinking of using LDAP with user-group features instead of relational DB, which does not support hierarchical data well, as i mentioned in this article. So C++ and GUI development would be a "group" while C++ GUI with Qt4 would be a "user" member of those groups. I know tag clouds basically do the same thing but they are not usually displayed in a tree format.
Other ideas i have:

1. You can also choose to brows to any depth of the tree. So you may want to see all branches or you may want to see a list of everything thats in languages all at once.
2. There is also a way to browse by author names.
3. Since its a "public library", users get to comment, rate and make a list of favorites.
4. If there are many ebooks in a directory, scan based on some pattern and add automatically.
5. Since a lot of the ebooks are in chm, let them be "a part" of the app using archmage, instead of having them downloaded.
6. Admin interface fully drag-and-drop (as expected of any web 2.0 app).
7. Viewing / uploading permissions.

I do not know if this is worth spending any time on either because of duplicate effort or lack of audience. What are your thoughts????
If this makes no sense and is useless, then is there any other ideas I can work on that may be useful to someone??

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