New From the Internet Archive: Bookserver, An Open System Allowing Users to Search Multiple eBook Catalogs from a Single Interface, Makes Crawling Easier Too!
Think one search interface allowing users to search multiple ebook catalogs from various providers. At the same time, making it easy for various search engines to crawl content from these and other ebook sources.
Before moving on to press coverage, you might want to take a look at a slide presentation about BookServer technology from Peter Brantley, Director, Bookserver Project at the Internet Archive and Co-Founder of the Open Book Alliance.
Also, you can get a very basic feel for searching with Bookserver technology by heading to homepage and looking for the search box on the page. You'll only be searching one catalog (The Open Library) but it uses Bookserver's Open Publication Distribution System (OPDS). Of course, all of the books you find are free to access, read, download, etc.
The Internet Archive and various like-minded partners have launched an open architecture for selling and lending digital books online, an effort to consolidate the fledgling market for net texts - and give Google a little food for thought.
Dubbed BookServer, the open platform is meant to provide a standard means for booksellers, publishers, libraries, and individual authors to serve texts onto laptops, netbooks, smartphones, game consoles, and specialized ereaders a la the Amazon Kindle. The Archive has already demonstrated an early incarnation of the architecture with the Kindle and Sony's Reader Digital Book.
Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle told CNET News that BookServer is about creating an open system that allows search engines to index books that are available from a wide group of sources. Effectively, commercial publishers, lending libraries and even individual authors would have a way to index their work and offer easy digital distribution under BookServer, Kahle said.
[Snip]
Kahle said that he's been thinking about such a project since before the advent of the World Wide Web, but that the technology has never been ready. But that's changed over the last 20 years, he said. "We've now gotten universal access to free (content)," Kahle added. "Now it's time to get universal access to all knowledge, and not all of this will be free."
Much More After a Click
[Snip]
[Our emphasis] "Right now, they're largely sitting it out or dying," Kahle said of publishers and libraries. "Publishers are not dictating the terms of the distribution of their work. They're handing it over to others...This puts them back in the driver's seat."
And while Kahle imagines that BookServer would by no means result in the end of bookstores or even online booksellers like Amazon, he hopes that publishers and libraries will finally be able to set up their own distribution systems to better compete.
+ The Internet Archive and its library partners have now scanned over 1.6 million books.
+ All of these books are in the EPub Format
+ They are also in Daisy format, used to create braille and text to speech.
In one fell swoop, the Internet Archive expanded the availability of books to millions of people who never had access before, bringing knowledge to places that had never had it. Who knows what new markets that will create, or more importantly what new minds will contribute to our collective wisdom as a result of that access. In the same motion, Brewster demonstrated a world where free can coexist with the library borrowing model, and with the commercial marketplace.
Make sure to read this complete article. it's worthy your time.
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