Making Books Transparent
Sayamindu and I have been contributing over the course of the year to a Bookserver initiative to define how digital texts are indexed, discovered, and distributed. The Open Content Alliance organized a conference yesterday and today in San Francisco to help us move forward with Bookserver development, improve the draft specification. It was an inspiring event, with a lot of good working code and interfaces to share with one another. Brewster throws a mean party, and when he announced he was hosting one last night to celebrate the launch of the Bookserver project and the Archive’s move into a beautiful new space in the Presidio, some 500 people turned up. I was pleased to run into Mary Lou, with four laptops sporting new Pixel Qi screens – low power, and yet so very hot.
I spoke about what OLPC is doing with this new specification – Sayamindu’s modified “Get Internet Archive Books” activity was the first client application to use the developing spec and beta book servers – and we spent some time brainstorming ways to improve OPDS. It’s an open group and process – all input is welcome.
On a related note, for those of you in the Boston area, come to the Boston Book Fest this coming Saturday in Copley Square, and visit our tent! We’re still looking for a few more volunteers, so drop me a line if you’re interested in helping out for a few hours between 9 and 5.
A festival of books: 1.6 Million beautiful works for the XO | One Laptop per Child said,
October 26, 2009 @ 10:06 am
[...] we announced a joint Bookserver project with the Archive to help all authors, libraries, and publishers share metadata in a way that can be [...]
לפטופ said,
October 28, 2009 @ 5:22 am
Very nice …!
Offline Book Server 0.01: Pathagar + Sheeva Plug for offline reading | One Laptop per Child said,
October 28, 2011 @ 2:42 pm
[...] who contributed to the design of the OPDS specification, and Manuel Quinoa, developed the Pathagar implementation of the spec which is used here. If [...]