The Cult of Brewster Finds Its Church. Web Of Books. Internet Archive: A Future for Books -- BookServer. The widespread success of digital reading devices has proven that the world is ready to read books on screens. As the audience for digital books grows, we can evolve from an environment of single devices connected to single sources into a distributed system where readers can find books from sources across the Web to read on whatever device they have.
Publishers are creating digital versions of their popular books, and the library community is creating digital archives of their printed collections. BookServer is an open system to find, buy, or borrow these books, just like we use an open system to find Web sites. The BookServer is a growing open architecture for vending and lending digital books over the Internet. Who Benefits? Developers? BookServer: A Plan to Build an Open Web of Books. The Internet Archive has just unveiled their ambitious project called BookServer, which will allow users to find, buy, or borrow digital books from sources all across the web. The system, built on an open architecture and using open book formats, promises that the books housed there will work on any device whether that's a laptop, PC, smartphone, game console, or one of the myriad of e-Readers like Amazon's Kindle.
The project's lofty goal is to essentially create an open web of books where anyone can publish their books and make their content available via search. Any Book, Open Formats Although still in the early days of development and potentially taking years to complete, the BookServer project will allow search engines to index books from all over the web. An Open Marketplace for eBooks Today, a few booksellers have partnered with the BookServer system including Feedbooks, O'Reilly, Adobe, and the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project. Web Of Books. Books: Electronic AND Print, Forever and Ever Amen - Tennant: Di. Amazon: Reinventing the Book | Newsweek.com.
The whole world seems to have seen that Newsweek is carrying a cover story about Kindle from Amazon ;-) The story is pretty positive. One notable aspect is the tight coupling of the service for delivering ebooks and other materials and the device for presenting them. This is a model we are familiar with from iTunes, but no intermediate computer is required here. The Kindle can connect wirelessly (using an EVDO-based service). Specifically, it's an extension of the familiar Amazon store (where, of course, Kindles will be sold). The article, by Steven Levy, also discusses adoption of ebooks in general terms. See the discussion by David Rothman on Teleread ("Do publishers and readers really want Amazon or Google to be the ultimate controllers of interactivity? ") I look forward to seeing one and trying it out. Related link: