Talk with Peter Brantley at TOC Frankfurt 2009 (see http://tocfrankfurt.com/page49/page49.html) For more see http://www.archive.org/bookserver and the related http://www.slideshare.net/naypinya/web-of-books Talk description: Books belong online. The high-volume digitization efforts of the Open Content Alliance, Europeana, and Google, in concert with the increasing number of ebook readers, have accelerated the need to achieve this goal. In this effort, there is an increasing need for open standards that allow book and magazine creators and distributors to publish catalogs of their available titles, help readers find interesting titles from a diverse array of publishers, libraries, and others, and enable a wide range of devices to function as ebook readers. The Internet Archive, in concert with O'Reilly Media, Threepress, Feedbooks, OLPC, Adobe, the Book Oven, and many others, have developed an open specification around the lightweight catalog format introduced by Lexcycle, maker of the Stanza iPhone App, to provide a web-based, mobile-friendly distribution mechanism for digital books. The Internet Archive calls this wider effort the "BookServer" architecture - in the sense that there can be a web of books --just as we have web servers to help produce a web of information online. From this web, a new system of business services can be built to leverage the synergies of books and readers online. We will explain BookServer's genesis and vision, discuss the components of the BookServer architecture, and highlight the opportunity for publishers, distributors, and aggregators to increase the reach of their digital content in today's burgeoning mobile and ebook landscape.

1. BookServer:
II. How, Now,
You & Next
Keith Fahlgren
O'Reilly Media
keith@oreilly.com

2. Create the
future you want
to inherit

3. How

4. The Web
jusfi on Flickr

5. Publishers

6. Distributors

7. Aggregators

8. Readers

9. Effective
catalogs
• Intelligent hierarchy
• Search
• Extensive faceting
• Human touch

10. Now

12. Very rough!

13. You

14. Your Voices
mindaugasdanys on Flickr

15. Old Content

16. Letting Go
• Non‐traditional partnerships
• DRM?
• Embrace (some) failure

17. Why
today?

18. Things to start
doing today
• Start acquiring international rights
• Catalog pages for every title
• At least one easy purchasing experience
(perhaps via a partnership)

19. Next

20. Pain
• Identifying distinct editions
• Handling content updates
• Simplifying transactions
• Understanding lending
• Publisher control or aggregator control?

21. Rights

22. Metadata

23. Opportunities
• Shared annotations
• Seamless updates
• Loans
• Physical + digital

24. ?