The BookServer is a growing open architecture for vending and lending digital books over the Internet. Built on open catalog and open book formats, the BookServer model allows a wide network of publishers, booksellers, libraries, and even authors to make their catalogs of books available directly to readers through their laptops, phones, netbooks, or dedicated reading devices. BookServer facilitates pay transactions, borrowing books from libraries, and downloading free, publicly accessible books.

As someone who has written serious, production-quality code for WM5 and WM6, I say this from many months of hard experience:

I WOULD RATHER STICK A FONDUE FORK THROUGH MY SCROTUM.

Never the fuck again will I develop for that platform. My god, I thought X11 was bad...

C'est ça la véritable expérience Windows Mobaïle.

# There are meaningful “entry points” into the app - URIs. (No, I’m not going to mention the R-word.) It’s simply entirely unacceptable for a Web app to expose only a single URI, break the “Back” button, and disallow linking. Frameworks that don’t support URIs for application concepts, such as every customer, order, contact report, document etc. should simply be banned.

# Application boundaries are a concern to developers, not users. The Web is about linking stuff together, without any concern about application boundaries. There’s absolutely no reason why you shouldn’t be able to follow a link in your CRM application that takes you to a product page in your online catalog, or from a customer record to the information about when they last logged in to the Web site, or from a page that’s part of a complex business process UI to the appropriate documentation and on to the discussion group where you can tell everybody how much it sucks.

# Documents are accessible in a standard way. The idea of accessing any kind of document, such as an insurance application form that’s been scanned in, a letter sent to a business partner last year, or a contract with a business partner, by any other means than an HTTP GET is just stupid.

Bridge is essentially a configurable and customizable “landing page” made up of Worldcat services. Libraries that currently link to worldcat.org from their catalog or link resolver might find Bridge to be an even more compelling destination, since they can customize it to their particular situation.

The Whole Earth Effect

How did a publication with just a four-year run help shape a community so prolific that it went on to inspire Google, Craigslist, and the blogosphere; save six American rivers; and shape sustainable business practices as we know them today? Forty years after the first issue of the Whole Earth Catalog, this oral history of the publication, as told by those who made it and those who read it, tracks the long-lasting impact of a short-lived journal that altered the course of the world.

We’re very excited about a little integration that the smartypants team over at Flickr have done with Open Library. If you happen to use Flickr and just happen to photograph the covers or insides of books you read, there’s an easy way to connect them to the catalog records we have on Open Library. You just have to add a thingy called a “machine tag,” the same way you would add any other tag, making use of a special format for the tag.

A card catalog designed to hold all of the songs on my iPod, 7,390 songs. Each song is cataloged on a single card. The cards are organized in reverse chronological order, that is the songs I listened to most recently are in the front of the catalog, and the songs I haven’t listened to in two years exist at the back. The piece is seven feet long when closed and just under fourteen feet when opened.

Amusements, Arcade Games & Entertainment

Catalogue de la vente aux enchères pour renflouer le Roi de la Pop, volume n°4, consacré aux jeux, jouets et bornes d'arcade : du lourd, on y trouve même un Virtual Boy !

For almost a year the Library of Congress Subject Headings were made available as SKOS from this site as an experiment. The goal was to leave the experiment active until there was a similar site running at the Library of Congress. However on December 18 I was asked to take the site down by the Library of Congress.

The Open Library is a project of the Internet Archive. Its goal is to create an online catalog that contains one web page for every book ever published. To do this, it accepts data from a variety of sources: libraries, publishers, book-sellers, and individuals.