colleagues,

I bring your attention to a blog post by bill mccoy of adobe
on what we (the Internet Archive, Adobe, and Lexcycle) are
calling the open publication distribution system, or opds.

http://blogs.adobe.com/billmccoy/2009/04/announcing_open.html

the idea is to encourage an environment where users can find
information about books from many places, under many different
terms, and usable in different contexts and in a variety of
devices.

one application of this might be for libraries to publish
information about their digital holdings, particularly with
an eye toward itemizing services they might support, e.g.
download, preview, or lending under certain conditions.

we are designing this to be simple, therefore quite
extensible.

it would not suck to have some top notch library-sector
coding involvement beyond the archive.

there is also a google groups, openpub.

if you would like to participate in the specification
process, please email me -- peter at /archive . org/.

yours,

pb