TOC: Speaking the Same Language

Least favorite thing about standards:

Tim Spalding: Bookstores are not online, they are web 1.0. You should be able to browse inventory online and know if something is in stock.

Kirk: DRM doesn't help anyone

OTIS: The best way to decide if you want a book is to read the excerpt. Publisher's should make the excerpt easily accessible. Random House keeps a spreadsheet of the videos with authors, but it's not available in an open API.

Clair: "As a lawyer I think going DRM free will come back in spades" "Open standards does not mean open content" Just because you release something in a feed doesn't mean you can't retain your copyright.

Kevin Smokler: Laying out book content well is nailed to the website. Data and nice layout should be automated and available.



Kirk: The web is an open and universal standard that is not owned by anyone. MS Office is universal and not open.

Tim: When looking for standards, look to the huge world of standards in libraries. ONIX was too insular of a discussion and not a real standard. Just take advantage of what libraries know, like FERBER (workid).

OTIS: Amazon created sites like goodreads and librarything by creating amazon webservices. Libraries and publishers should expose their data in the same format. You can't imagine the uses that people will come up with for your data.

Clair: Use the digital millennium copyright act to write a letter in 15 minutes and send a notice when you see your content reused. [if we build a booklamp data set we could check the web for this and send the letters easily] use well targeted attacks, don't go after your customers like the RIAA did. Try going DRM free and see how it goes. Make your customers trust you. Magnitune is doing well with the idea that "we're not evil" and let customers set a price between 5 to $18 and the average price was $15.

OTIS: I know a record producer who hated YouTube two years ago and now loves it because there's revenue sharing via YouTube and now he drives content to it. People will pay for content if its easy to do. Right now that's not true of eBooks

Tim: DRM free eBooks is a down elevator for profits for publishers. Music labels aren't really needed anymore with the new digital world, but what separates music from books is that book publishers provide all sorts of services and data around a book and they should focus on that.

Kevin: The data you have (like author events) is useful to people and you should make it available.

Tim: Get the reading guides out there. Just make a PDF in a folder somewhere.