Feedbooks: Thoughts on OPDS – really interesting post
By Paul Biba
Feedbooks has put up a post about OPDS and what Feedbooks would like to accomplish in the future. I must admit that I never realized all the technical problems in distributing ebooks. It’s just not that simple if you want to do it well.
For several months, we’ve been distributing books to Stanza through our Atom endpoints. While the idea of using a standard format (Atom) as a catalog format was a good one, Lexcycle quickly had to extend things through new rel values or additional markup to support things such as thumbnails, search or links to similar books. OPDS (Open Publication Distribution System) is an attempt to standardize these extensions and create a solution that any reading system or content provider could use.
But aside from using more standard rel values and mimetypes, we need to think beyond the current implementation in Stanza if we’d like to create a great browsing and shopping experience.
The AppStore on the iPhone is a good example of what we shouldn’t do: it’s almost impossible to discover new applications and strictly limited to search and a few lists with the most popular applications.
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