Liveblogging Day 2 of the “Making Books Apparent” meeting

George Oates, IA, Open Library:

OpenLibrary.org redesign going live in 1-2 months!

SJ Klein, One Laptop Per Child:

As of last week, all 400,000 school children in Uruguay have OLPC Laptops! They are carried in bags like this:

After collecting 2.5-3 years of data, Uruguay estimates TCO of an OLPC XO laptop to be $280 for four years of use. The hardware cost is about $190 of this, the rest is maintenance cost.

BookServer Use Cases:

• Collaborative writings
• InfoSlicer: OLPC wikipedia mashup activity
• Reading books, now with EPUB support, soon with direct editing
• “Get IA Books” activity was one of the first BookServer software clients!

Showing the Rural Design Collective’s prototype topic browser for books on the OLPC:

Minh Truong, Aldiko:

Beta version of Aldiko showing IA Bookserver integration!

Liza Daly, ThreePress, Ibis Reader:

Ibis Reader: “The ereader designed for readers first!”

Standards-based cloud iPhone reader with offline support, and non-drm purchasing.

Uses standards all the way: BookServer, OPDS, EPUB, and HTML5.

Adam Hyde and Douglass Bagnall, FLOSS Manuals, and Booki:

Booki is a “book wiki”: an open-source online writing and publishing engine.

Booki Developers

• We are not publishers
• As artists we have come to know and love free (LIBRE) technology and free (LIBRE) content
• We have founded, work with/in, mentored, and grown the FLOSS Manuals community for 2+ years

INCREDIBLE demo:

Booki being used to ingest EPUB from archive.org, correct OCR mistakes, and then re-upload to archive.org!

Above, using Booki to correct typos in IA’s Tom Sawyer EPUB!

Bill Janssen, PARC:

UpLib is an open-source personal digital library system:

Michael Tamblyn, Shortcovers:

“Your whole reading life, always with you.”

“How OPDS can help”, in the form of a screenplay:

OPDS needs to address Territorial Rights problems.

Cartwright Reed, VP Product Development, Ingram:

• It cost Ingram $6 to print a book and $0.50 to deliver. This cost is $0 and $0.01 for an ebook.
• Transition from physical to digital is happening faster than most people in the industry were expecting.
• DRM is dud. It just takes one person to copy and share a file.
• Music lead the way in transition from analog to digital, and is leading the way again in the transition from DRM to DRM-Free
• Production, distribution, and discovery are nearly free.
• Creation, curation, and community are not free.
• The digital space is the exciting one.
• As long as content is static, it doesn’t accrete value.
• Physical book sales 1.5 years ago (estimate)

Current distribution chain:

Author -> Publisher -> Distributer -> Reseller -> Consumer

BookServer allows you to go straight from Author->Consumer, or any other iteration in the above distribution chain.

Liveblogging the “Making Books Apparent” meeting

Brewster Kahle, IA:

• 1.6 Million public domain books on archive.org
• 20 Scanning centers in 5 countries
• 150 contributing libraries
• 20th century books not well-represented online
• IA is starting to receive and own physical books
• Today, IA will launch the BookServer project, and demostrate loans of 20th century works
• BookServer will integrate publishers, libraries, booksellers, and readers in in an open, robust system.

Peter Brantley, IA:

• We need a web of books that will permit people to find, buy, download, and read books on any device.
• Will be based on Lexcycle’s Stanza iPhone app
• The data interchange will be based on Atom
• BookServer will work with any e-book format. EPUB will be the common format.

Terminology:

• “Bookserver” is the architechture.
• “OPDS” is the technical specification.
• “Catalogs” are made using OPDS.
• “Atom” is the XML scheme for OPDS.

Ecosystem:

• Any web site can run a bookstore.
• Libraries, bookstores, and publishers can join in
• Search engines can server as book gateways
• Aggregators can harvest multiple catalogs
• New uses will be emerging

New NLS Digital Talking Book Player for the Print Disabled:

Keith Fahlgren, O’Reilly Media:

” I really like to create the future I want to inherit.”

How:

• Distributors
• Aggregators
• Readers (both people and devices)

Marc Prud’hommeaux, Lexcycle:

Showing demo of how 1.5M IA EPUBs in Stanza, through BookServer ecosystem:

Hadrien Gardeur, Feedbooks:

Subscriptions in OPDS:

A Hulu for Magazines and Newspapers through OPDS? Sure, we can do it!

Michael Ang, IA:

Open-source tools for creating OPDS catalogs at http://github.com/internetarchive