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Folks involved in the Open Publication Distribution System (OPDS) effort are seeking feedback on the latest version of the spec [1] from the publishing and library communities--and specifically from the library-tech oriented code4lib subscribers. The goal is to gather enough feedback for a v1.0 release mid-2010. If you haven't run across it yet, OPDS is a simple pattern for using Atom to make "catalogs" of ebooks (and their metadata) available. Personally, I think it is a critical piece of infrastructure for the rapidly expanding ebook marketplace, that allows reading devices and publishers/distributors to participate in a shared and collaborative ecosystem that is built on the web. Incidentally, I think OPDS also showcases how to use Atom to share metadata about books as well, akin to Jangle [2]. It also bears a striking resemblance to the Google Book API [3]. In short, if you publishing or consume ebooks on the web you should definitely take a look. More information regarding OPDS, and where to send your comments/suggestions/fixes is below in the announcement from Keith Fahlgren. Of course, discussion on code4lib is welcome as well. //Ed The OPDS Catalogs 0.9 draft [1] is now ready for your review and we'd love to get your feedback and comments. Please submit any and all critiques or comments to the openpub mailing list [4] or add an issue [5] by 19 May 2010. What are OPDS Catalogs? OPDS stands for "Open Publication Distribution System" and OPDS Catalogs enable the aggregation, distribution, and discovery of books, journals, and other digital content by any user, from any source, in any electronic format, on any device. The OPDS Catalogs specification is based on the Atom syndication format and prioritizes simplicity and speed. Is this vaporware? Nope. The OPDS Catalogs 0.9 draft is based on a lot of existing, in-production software and collaboration between ebook reading systems, publishers, and distributors. Feedbooks, for example, already distributes more than 2 million ebooks every month using its OPDS Catalogs (http://feedbooks.com/catalog.atom) and ebook readers like Aldiko, Stanza, QuickReader, FBReader, Ibis Reader, and others already support the evolving specification. Publishers and libraries have been early adopters of the OPDS Catalogs as the specification has evolved toward 0.9 as well. Some highlights: * Internet Archive: 1.8 million free books [6] * O'Reilly Media: hundreds of technical ebooks [7] * PragPub Magazine, from The Pragmatic Programmers [8] * Smashwords [9] OPDS Catalogs are the first component in the Internet Archive’s BookServer Project [10] [1] http://code.google.com/p/openpub/wiki/CatalogSpecDraft [2] http://jangle.org/ [3] http://code.google.com/apis/books/docs/gdata/developers_guide_protocol.html#SearchResultFeed [4] http://groups.google.com/group/openpub [5] http://code.google.com/p/openpub/issues/entry [6] http://bookserver.archive.org/catalog/ [7] http://catalog.oreilly.com/aldiko/main.xml [8] http://pragprog.com/magazines.opds [9] http://www.smashwords.com/atom [10] http://www.archive.org/bookserver