Aldiko and Stanza users can now browse our catalog in French.
We auto-detect the language based on your system settings: if you’re using French we’ll properly localize the catalog, for any other language we’ll display the default English catalog.
Aldiko users need to update their software to the latest version available on the Market. For Stanza users, any version should work fine.
Now that we’re done working on the catalog, localization of the website is currently under development.
These last few months, the OPDS (Open Publication Distribution System) Working Group has made a tremendous job and we’re getting close to the point where we’ll have a first version of a stable specification.
For those of you who are not familiar with OPDS and the BookServer ecosystem:
The BookServer is a growing open architecture for vending and lending digital books over the Internet. Built on open catalog and open book formats, the BookServer model allows a wide network of publishers, booksellers, libraries, and even authors to make their catalogs of books available directly to readers through their laptops, phones, netbooks, or dedicated reading devices. BookServer facilitates pay transactions, borrowing books from libraries, and downloading free, publicly accessible books.
Feedbooks contributed to this effort and continues to maintain an OPDS catalog following the recent developments on the specification.
While the spec isn’t fully ready yet, we already have a vibrant ecosystem of developers, softwares and services based on our OPDS. The purpose of this post is to give a quick overview of the ecosystem but keep in mind that things are still moving very fast.
Social Networks
Search Engines
Reading Systems
I’m most likely missing a few of them but it’s very exciting to see that some of the most popular social networks, search engines and reading systems already support OPDS.
Update: Added BookGlutton and Lovely Reader.
Nick Name is a tech-absurdist from Poland. His ironic short stories show how deeply our lives depend on technology. Runs litexperimental projects including Twitter’s #hashtagstory and Google-translated fiction. Guest writer at TeleRead, Publetariat and Fiction Matters. Believes in mobile e-books. They can bring the joy of reading to those, who don’t feel like consuming books the old-fashioned way. His dream is to be a default fiction author for any mobile device with eReading capabilities.
For our second interview, we’re glad to talk to Small Stories who recently published the first Wave fiction on Feedbooks (Bathrobe Guru), but also two collections of nanofiction (Small Stories, Uncollected Stories) and Twitter novels (Eating Grass, What It Means).
I write microfiction using the tag ‘Small Stories’. I have always conceived of my work existing within the digital domain. I have championed short form writing and mobile reading / writing on digital devices such as ereaders and mobile phones.
Last week, a fifth self-published book passed the 10.000 downloads mark (see top books). To celebrate this, we’ll be conducting interviews with various authors published on Feedbooks for a few weeks.
Our first interview will be with L. Lee Lowe, author of “Mortal Ghost” and currently serializing “Corvus” on Feedbooks.
Lee is an online writer who was born in New York and educated in the United States, France, and Germany. She spent eighteen years living and working in Zimbabwe, where her five children were also born. Now she lives in the hills above the Rhine near Cologne, Germany. When she’s not busy trying to restrain her dog Gypsy, a border-collie mix, from herding the local cows, horses, and vociferous crows, she can be found at her desk with her router disconnected while she writes.
Aside from applications such as Stanza on the iPhone and Aldiko on Android, several services use our API to search and import e-books.
Bookworm and Bookglutton are both web-based services designed to read EPUB files. Bookworm provides both a normal and mobile version of its service, while Bookglutton is based around the idea of a social reading experience with support for shared annotations.
With it latest update, Bookworm displays a list of most popular books from Feedbooks, while Bookglutton can perform a search on Feedbooks to import books. With both services, you can also use the URL of an EPUB book on Feedbooks to import your book.
Looking for a quick read ? You’ll find plenty of short fiction on our Original Books section. Among the new releases you’ll find:
I’ve been talking about a full redesign on both Twitter and Facebook lately, and even published the first screenshots of the new design.
It’s time to explain why we’re working on a new design: to make Feedbooks easier to use through a simple and consistent layout.
The first thing that you’ll notice about our new global navigation is that we renamed the sections. “Discover” is renamed into “Public Domain” and “Share” into “Original Books”. While the books published in the “Public Domain” section are author-centric (points to a specific page with various metadata), the books published in “Original Books” are user-centric, and will point out directly to the profile of the user.
We’ll gradually introduce new interactions between readers and authors to make the promotion of a book much easier. You’ll notice that compared to the current design, comments, favorites and downloads are now highlighted a lot more to serve this purpose and new links to automatically post a book on Twitter/Facebook are now available.
What is Aldiko?
Aldiko is an ebook reading application that runs on any Android phone and which enables you to easily download and read thousands of books right on your smartphone.
We’re glad to announce that this new EPUB reading system, capable of downloading content directly from Feedbooks is now available. We’ve worked with our friends at Aldiko to make this experience as seamless as possible: it is actually based on the same Atom catalog format that we’re using for Stanza. I’m glad that we finally have a second reading system commited to implement the future OPDS standard, and Aldiko actually implements some of the recommendations that we recently submitted.
Once again, Feedbooks is the first platform available on a new reading system. We’ve been very successful with Stanza (Neelan recently announced that 8 million EPUB files have been distributed on Stanza. 75% of these files came from Feedbooks) and hope to have a similar success with any new reading system on the market. The Android platform is very attractive and with 18 new Android-based devices in 2009, it should get some significant share of the smartphone market.
Update: In-depth review at the Gadgeteer
First of all, Roger Sperberg wrote an excellent comment about the current OPDS draft:
With blogging, the Atom feed entry ought to include either a content child — containing the full blog post or a link to it (and the link relationship identified as ‘alternate’) — or a summary child whose content is an extract, abstract or short summary of one of the three types above.
If OPDS is a catalog of books, then there’s a mismatch between the blog model and the catalog model. The content in the catalog is material about a book, and the feed therefore ought to have the full material in content or a summary of it. A link child of contentshould take the feed’s consumer to that “full material.”
So maybe the catalog copy shouldn’t be likened to blog posts.
Then content could contain a link to the epub, and the catalog description would go into summary. Of course, the full descriptions in the catalog might be too long to use as intended in this type of feed.
In that case, just create a new type of relationship link, as was done in the examples for cover image and thumbnail, that describes whether this longer content is a synopsis, review or just longer description.
I agree with most of this comment. It makes more sense to use content for the EPUB file and summary for the description. We should also extend Atom rather than describe everything in XHTML: using DublinCore to describe the language, copyright status, publication date and other metadata.
Partial entry/Full entry
The current draft is full of new rel values, a design choice that we should avoid as much as possible (most of the time, a type and a rel value registered at the IANA link registry would be enough).
To support entries with longer content, as recommended by Roger Sperberg, we don’t need a new relationship link. In AtomPub:
Clients MUST NOT assume that an Atom Entry returned in the Feed is a full representation of an Entry Resource and SHOULD perform a GET on the URI of the Member Entry before editing it.
In the same RFC5023 for AtomPub, the “type” parameter was defined:
This specification defines a new “type” parameter for use with the “application/atom+xml” media type. The “type” parameter has a value of “entry” or “feed”.
Neither the parameter name nor its value are case sensitive.
The value “entry” indicates that the media type identifies an Atom Entry Document. The root element of the document MUST be atom:entry.
The value “feed” indicates that the media type identifies an Atom Feed Document. The root element of the document MUST be atom:feed.
If not specified, the type is assumed to be unspecified, requiring Atom processors to examine the root element to determine the type of Atom document.
Thanks to this type parameter, it’s fairly easy to point from a partial entry to a full entry using a link@rel="alternate"
<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml;type=entry" href="..." />For sources with a RDF document available (such as O’Reilly, and Feedbooks in the upcoming weeks), the same link@rel="alternate" could be used with application/rdf+xml.
Controlled vocabularies
The publication metadata required and allowed in OPF, should have the same status in OPDS.
Once the goals for OPDS are clearly defined (oops), we might extend this.
Any provider should be allowed to use additional extensions in their full entries.
Relationship to AtomPub
To allow such things as comments/reviews, OPDS could also support AtomPub. With both the Atom Threading Extension and the current work on Collection Discovery, it should be fairly simple to support.
