Help OPDS Catalogs reach version 1.0
by Keith Fahlgren
The OPDS Catalog specification has seen tremendous growth in the last year and it’s now fast approaching version 1.0. We’re delighted to request your final comments and critiques on the 1.0 draft through 17 August 2010.
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. They’re becoming an increasingly popular technique for moving ebooks around between companies in addition to offering an attractive browsing experience to readers looking for something good to read.
Feedbooks, the biggest OPDS Catalog success story, already distributes more than 2 million ebooks every month using its OPDS Catalogs. They’ve just posted a great overview of their ecosystem, which really shows the breadth of support for OPDS Catalogs today.
OPDS Catalogs are the first component in the Internet Archive’s BookServer Project.
Comments
Have the “Indirect Acquisitions” been removed from OPDS 1.0? Can I then no longer link to a web page from which the ebook can be downloaded, but to which (the ebook) I cannot link directly?
I was doing a test with this in OPDS 0.9, and found that IbisReader doesn’t display the title and thumbnail of such entries anyway… See http://djelibeibi.unex.es/libros/catalog/main.atom in the Italian books section, the 3rd entry (Il Gattopardo, by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa).
You’re right—version 1.0 of OPDS Catalogs doesn’t explicitly specify anything about Indirect Acquisition because there was no consensus. If it’s something you’d like to see specified, please let us know what you need from Indirect Acquisition on the openpub mailing list at http://groups.google.com/group/openpub.
> 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.
sounds fantastically inclusive.
but as i recall, only the .epub format is supported?
am i right about that?
-bowerbird
You’re mistaken. OPDS Catalogs have been format-agnostic for more than a year.