Adobe Teams Up With Stanza to Create Open EBook Catalog Standard

Moejoe · 04-11-2009, 08:45 AM

Quote:

Adobe and Lexcycle, the company behind the popular Stanza eBook application, announced today that they are working together with the Internet Archive on turning the Stanza online catalog system into an open standard for distributing free and commercial eBooks. This new standard, the Open Publication Distribution System (OPDS), will be built on top of Atom, and aims to create an open standard for distributed online catalogs for electronic books.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives...k_standard.php

wallcraft · 04-11-2009, 11:59 PM

This is potentially very important for DRM-free ebook sites. It isn't entirely clear what "open" means, but OpenPub offers the opportunity for DRM-free ebook tools, such as FBReader and Calibre, to have access to free and paid DRM-free content at multiple sites. OpenPub will also deliver DRM-ridden ebooks, but those are not of direct interest of DRM-free tools.

For example, Baen is putting a Stanza catalog in place (Stanza interface for Baen Webscriptions). It would probably already be possible for another reader app to access this catalog, but if it was an OpenPub catalog how to do so would be documented.

fugazied · 04-12-2009, 12:12 AM

A lot of companies throw around the term 'open' pretty loosely. However some 'open' formats are needed (as in formats which work on all devices and are well optimised). All of these devices working with their own little proprietary systems does get annoying.

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04-11-2009, 11:59 PM	#2
wallcraft reader Posts: 6,975 Karma: 5183568 Join Date: Mar 2006 Location: Mississippi, USA Device: Kindle 3, Kobo Glo HD	This is potentially very important for DRM-free ebook sites. It isn't entirely clear what "open" means, but OpenPub offers the opportunity for DRM-free ebook tools, such as FBReader and Calibre, to have access to free and paid DRM-free content at multiple sites. OpenPub will also deliver DRM-ridden ebooks, but those are not of direct interest of DRM-free tools. For example, Baen is putting a Stanza catalog in place (Stanza interface for Baen Webscriptions). It would probably already be possible for another reader app to access this catalog, but if it was an OpenPub catalog how to do so would be documented.

04-12-2009, 12:12 AM	#3
fugazied Wizard Posts: 1,305 Karma: 1958 Join Date: Jan 2009 Device: iPod Touch	A lot of companies throw around the term 'open' pretty loosely. However some 'open' formats are needed (as in formats which work on all devices and are well optimised). All of these devices working with their own little proprietary systems does get annoying.

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