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