Entries tagged with “api” from Tools of Change for Publishing
Open XML API for O'Reilly Metadata
Andrew Savikas
February 10, 2009
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In addition to Bookworm, O'Reilly Labs now includes an RDF-based API into all of O'Reilly's books:
Most publishers are familiar with the ONIX standard for exchanging metadata about books among trading partners. Anyone who's actually spent time working with ONIX knows that its syntax is abstruse at best. While ONIX does use XML, there are more modern, more general, and more immediately comprehensible standards out there, particularly for the basic details like "author," "title," and "edition." One of those standards is RDF, or "Resource Description Framework." This experimental O'Reilly Product Metadata Interface (OPMI) exposes RDF for all of O'Reilly's titles, organized by ISBN.
If anyone onsite (or otherwise) puts anything interesting together with the data, we'll be happy to feature it here on the TOC Blog, just let us know in the comments.
New York Times Opens "Best Sellers API"
Andrew Savikas
January 28, 2009
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The New York Times on Tuesday opened up its "Best Sellers API," offering programmatic access to best-seller data (going back to 1930!) from the Times:
The Times Best Sellers API gives you quick access to current and past best-seller lists in 11 different categories, such as Hardcover Nonfiction and Paperback Mass-Market Fiction. The initial launch offers every weekly list since June 2008, and in the coming months, we plan to add data going back to 1930 (thanks to the hard work of our Books staff). The API also offers details about specific best sellers, including historical rank information and links to New York Times reviews and excerpts. And these aren't just canned responses; they're searchable and sortable, with even more robust options coming in the next release.
I'm a huge fan of what the Times has done to embrace open architecture and data formats (and Nick Bilton, from the Times' R&D Lab, will be a keynote speaker at next month's TOC Conference), and this is a great example of what content creators and curators (i.e., publishers) can do to give customers the opportunity to create new value on top of that content. We've offered an API for our Safari Books Online product for several years now, and have some very interesting internal projects percolating to take things a step further.
APIs, New "Transactions" and the Google Book Search Registry
Peter Brantley
November 13, 2008
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At PersonaNonData, Michael Cairns discusses the Google Book Search registry, and muses whether it might support certain types of transactions through an API:
How the registry may be formed is anyone's guess, but for sake of argument I envision a pyramidal structure. The identifier segment forms the pointy top layer, bibliographic data the second layer, content the third and the 'transaction gateway' the bottom tier. Then again maybe it's a cube and I should be adding subjects, a retail/library segmentation, and transactional details like rights information. Regardless, it seems to me combining each of these segments into a registry might engender significant opportunities to improve the publishing supply chain. But more than that, the combination I suggest works better for the on-line world than the off which is the failing of the current crop of ISBN databases (including Amazon.com) ...
... The most obvious application enabled via the 'transaction gateway' would be purchase but a 'transaction' can be many things: views, queries, checkin-out, use rights, syndication and may more. An open service architecture would enable development of third party API's that could result in all kinds of new applications but existing ones would also benefit as well. Worldcat and Copyright Clearinghouse applications are good examples where users could find the physical content in a library or attain usage rights from CCC.
New York Times Movie Reviews Released as API
Peter Brantley
October 30, 2008
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The New York Times has released an application programming interface (API) to its movie reviews, which is a rather significant feature. From the Times' Open blog:
Finally -- and this is the key -- we're giving you access to our Movies search feature, containing all 22,000 reviews indexed by title, reviewer's name, director's name, names of the top five actors, and plot keywords. So, if you'd like to build a list of what The New York Times thinks of Pedro Almodóvar or Lindsay Lohan, we've got you covered. And this is only the beginning: in the next few weeks we'll be rolling out better lookup and search features that will let you call up reviews based on publication date or the movie's release date, just to name two.
The Times also released campaign finance and metadata APIs earlier this month.
XML and APIs: Perfect Together
Brian O'Leary
September 24, 2008
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This week's formal announcement of the first three APIs for Google Book Search provides a frame for the "why" in StartWithXML: Why and How?
Although Google has confirmed just a few APIs, or application programming interfaces, the firm has clearly opened the door to making book content more easily searchable and findable and, through the use of some standard identifiers, more meaningful.
It's that last part that makes the use of XML even more compelling. While the first set of tools naturally provides publishers with the ability to call attention to bodies of work (including reviews and ratings), it is easy to see that next-generation APIs, developed by Google and exploited by publishers, will allow users to search content much more deeply and finely than full-text search currently allows.
As those capabilities come online, the ability to provide structured content that includes reader-valued tags will greatly improve the search experience. While Google controls the search capability, publishers will be able to use APIs to develop compatible tools and employ XML to structure and tag content in ways that improve search results for the content they publish. Ultimately, relevance and visibility will drive awareness, trial and purchase.
CEOs Must Have API Literacy
Peter Brantley
September 23, 2008
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With the release of the expanded Google Book Search application programming interface (API) presenting new opportunities and decisions for publishers, Adam Hodgin argues for API-literate CEOs:
Why does it matter whether your CEO knows what an API is? It matters because publishers (and newspaper owners, TV networks, film studios, content makers of all shapes) are not going to allow Google (YouTube, he she or ItTube, or anybody else) to manage and define the API which has access to their content. Having, or buying into, allying with, the API's which manage and accesses your content may be the key decision for media companies in the next decade. Either your CEO knows what an API is, and can find out how, in strategic terms, to negotiate Google's, Amazon's, Facebook's and Apple's, or he/she needs to be a media genius who does it by gut instinct (Rupert Murdoch is the only one of those that I can think of and he is the wrong side of 70). The heads of Random House, Conde Nast, Elsevier, Cengage, Hachette and Pearson really ought to have an intuition about the way their business can develop an API to the servers which are hosting all their content. I wonder if any of them do?
Google Book Search Listings Now Embeddable
Mac Slocum
September 22, 2008
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Titles from from Google's Book Search index can now be embedded in non-Google Web pages. From Inside Google Book Search:
We're launching a set of free tools that allow retailers, publishers, and anyone with a web site to embed books from the Google Book Search index. We are also providing new ways for these sites to display full-text search results from Book Search, and even integrate with social features such as ratings, reviews, and readers' book collections.
Google's Preview tool is already being used by publishers (including O'Reilly), retailers, libraries and other sites.
Basic Book Search previews are generated through Google's preview wizard (example below). Customized results can be built with the Book Search APIs.
Embedded Book Search example:
EPUB Creation Just Got Simpler
Keith Fahlgren
May 12, 2008
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BookGlutton announced last week that it had developed a Web-based (X)HTML to EPUB conversion form (and API). The form itself accepts HTML or XHTML documents and returns an .epub file (in a couple of seconds) for download. While it doesn't yet support images or CSS stylesheets, it sounds like these features are coming. My handful of tests of the tool have all "just worked." I grabbed HTML files I found on the Web and an HTML version of a recent O'Reilly title and all were happily accepted. The resulting .epub file opened fine in Adobe Digital Editions and was readable.
The impact of this sort of easy-to-use form is huge, as so many content creation tools already support (X)HTML output in some way, from Word to OpenOffice.org to DocBook to Dreamweaver. It should be the first step in lowering the barrier to entry to creating EPUB documents. Bob DuCharme had already showed technical experts how to create .epub files with nothing but free tools and I'm hopeful that the Save as DAISY output from Word will help create more accessible documents, but there's nothing like a simple Web form to bring a complicated standard to the masses.
That said, the lack of CSS and image support really makes this more of a proof-of-concept than a real tool today, unless you're only interested in reading narrative text. With that in mind, let's give it a shot (in Firefox, on my Mac):
- Find Wikipedia's article on E-book.
Save As: Web Page, HTML only (so you don't bother with the images or CSS):
Now take that HTML file from your computer and feed it right back to the BookGlutton form:
Hit convert, then open the resulting .epub in Adobe Digital Editions:
Here's the resulting .epub, for the lazy: wikipedia_on_E-book.epub. I also tried two other samples: the 3rd chapter from Word Hacks (word_hacks_chapter_3.epub) and the Ebook Format Primer from the TOC blog (ebook-format-primer.epub).
So, given our three samples, what are the current drawbacks? Well, as I mentioned before, the lack of images and CSS supprt as the two obvious ones, especially for the book content (which had images, unlike the blog post). There's also the all-too-common drawback of HTML from the wild-wild Web being rather funky. You can see an example of that sort of oddness on the first page of the Wikipedia sample in Digital Editions (which is including some JavaScript code meant to be executed by the browser) :
// document.writeln("\x3cp\x3e\x3ca href=\"http://wikimania2008.wikimedia.org/wiki/Registration\"
blah blah blah
...but that stuff is ignorable and could be removed from the HTML if one cared. Another concern is that while the internal linking (from the Contents, for example) works, some of the external links back to other parts of Wikipedia don't. Linking is a major advantage of ebooks, so this is a sad one, though this is a common web problem and not really BookGlutton's fault. My final complaint has to do with special characters (n spaces), which seem to have gotten messed up in the book content (look around the "Figure" references). That said, the blog post looks pretty nice, once you find it a little later in the document.
Although at this stage it's just a prototype, BookGlutton's work might encourage the re-use of existing content published on the Web packaged as an ebook. This type of thing should significantly increase the number of .epub files ready to go into (format-friendly) ebook devices and create more pressure on ebook device manufacturers to support EPUB.
It's time for the "regular" folks to step out of the woodwork and give this EPUB thing a try!
Google Opens Book Search with API
Mac Slocum
March 13, 2008
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Google Book Search has released a Viewability API that lets organizations embed book images, previews and links to Google Book Search results within their own Web sites.
A search result from the Deschutes Public Library in Oregon illustrates one potential use for the API: offering a "preview this book at Google" link within a book's library record.
Clicking the link brings up the book's Google Book Search result, which allows the reader to scan pages and dig deeper into book content.
(Links via Peter Brantley's read20 listserv.)
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