John Miedema

OpenBook hit a milestone today with one thousand downloads from the WordPress server. The first download was in June of 2008.

For those of you who aren’t sure what this OpenBook business is all about … well, there are different ways to look at it. On the surface, OpenBook is just a book widget for WordPress users. It’s an easy way to insert a book cover, title, author, publisher from Open Library into a web page. Nice. It also has more sophisticated features for those who want them, such as COinS for auto-detection by applications like Zotero. Nifty stuff.

The next idea I have cooking is more interesting. Right now, OpenBook provides a link to the WorldCat record of a book so users find it in their local library. Problem is, it is only for member libraries, excluding several small public libraries including my own. In order to hook up to them, the libraries have to expose their catalogue in a consistent way. In fact, many of them do without even knowing it. Following a few simple assumptions about how library catalogues work, I believe it is possible to “screen-scrape” a book search and link from most libraries. Getting interested?

What is most compelling is that OpenBook is free and open source — the entire codebase is available for inspection and innovation by the library world. To facilitate that sharing, I invite you to join a conversation that is starting about open source book widgets. No techie experience required, only an interest in book widgets, those little interfaces for sharing book data. Join our discussion list. Edit our wiki. Or just have a peek. More information to follow later.