Tag Archives: catalogue

OPDS: building an ebook catalogue

This is part of a series wrapping up (belatedly, alas) the findings from Project Sunflower. As the protagonists of the Project have moved on to pastures new, leaving their notes behind, editorial duty has fallen to yours truly.

In this post, we look at OPDS, otherwise known as ‘Open Publication Distribution System’, and why it’s worth a look for anybody intending to integrate ebook platforms into the student experience. For anybody who’d rather skip ahead, version 1.1 of the standard can be found right here.

OPDS is, according to the specification, designed as

a syndication format for electronic publications based on Atom and HTTP

and can

enable the aggregation, distribution, discovery, and acquisition of electronic publications

using

existing or emergent open standards and conventions, with a priority on simplicity.

Now, as we will see from reviewing the performance of typical embedded ebook search/indexing functions and interfaces, most ebook readers aren’t designed to contain huge numbers of ebooks. At 7.99 an ebook, most readers will be cautious in their acquisitions, so perhaps the perception from some manufacturers is that it is pointless to create readers that specialise in navigating across hundreds of thousands of files. Many portable media devices suffer from similar difficulties – the classic ‘clickwheel’ interface on iPods, as applied to a large number of files, became the subject of a 2009 satirical report by The Onion.

The relevance of OPDS is the following: OPDS allows you to search and browse across extensive collections of documents. They don’t need to be books; an OPDS frontend on an institutional repository is perfectly achievable, format conversion notwithstanding. The obvious use case is searching or browsing for a single file, but part of the relevance of OPDS is the fact that it also allows for batch mode: a student downloading the full reading list for the semester, for example. Wouldn’t that be convenient?

An OPDS catalogue is fairly straightforward to set up. For prototyping purposes, the well-known ebook software Calibre can be used to experiment with the concept; it can be found in the Calibre software under Preferences->Network->Sharing over the net, and is referred to as a ‘Content Server’. If you’d rather experiment with a static OPDS catalogue — providing no search function, but with browse functions that make full use of your metadata — consider trying calibre2opds, a Java application that renders your Calibre catalogue as a set of static HTML pages and, being simpler and more secure (by dint of having very few moving parts), may be considered a relatively secure way of deploying a prototype. A comparison of these alternatives may be found here.

Cross-platform compatibility: Limited.

Android and the iPad approach this on a per-application basis, and a good implementation is available for both. iBooks won’t handle the catalogue functionality, but you can manually type the address into Safari; then, when you click on an ePub file, iBooks can handle the download. Alternatively, you can use Stanza, which works well – but when iOS 5 came out, we discovered that Stanza ceased to work until we updated the iPad to the latest version, so be prepared for sudden failures around the time of iOS upgrades.

The Kindle is able to use OPDS catalogues, but requires them to run on port 80 (the usual port for a web server, admittedly, but not Calibre’s preferred choice for practical reasons). Simpler e-Ink devices mostly still do not have any mechanism for connecting to the Web, and therefore this sort of functionality is not available on the platform itself, so desktop software must be used instead.

Ease of setup: Moderate.

Getting a Calibre content-server running on a home network is relatively easy provided that the user is familiar with terms like ‘IP address’. However, practical implementation on a larger scale requires significantly more thought; not only are there security and sustainability issues around the software, but the usability of the resulting catalogue is very dependent on good metadata.

Benefits

Standard, relatively simple to set up, and extremely liberating – a convenient distribution channel, bypassing the need to centralise via a commercial vendor, what’s not to like?

Disadvantages

Support for OPDS is patchy and the standard is still relatively recent. Many popular ebook reader applications do not support it explicitly. Fortunately, it’s so near to popular standards that all you really need is a web browser and an ebook reader to get some benefit from an OPDS.

Sample screenshots

Browse by tag screenshot

Browsing the Calibre content server by tag

 

Browse by author screenshot

Browse by author