Tag Archives: Open Source

Re-thinking Open Library’s Book Pages

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by Mek Karpeles, Tabish Shaikh

We’ve redesigned our Book Pages: Before →After.
Please share your feedback with us.

A web page for every book… This is the mission of Open Library: a free, inclusive, online digital library catalog which helps readers find information about any book ever published.

Millions of books in Open Library’s catalog have been made available to preview, read, or borrow using the Internet Archive’s controlled digital lending library. However, the catalog also features tens of millions of books which are yet to have previews and instead serve as resources that help patrons learn more about books, share lists of books they love, keep track of what they’re reading, and locate copies from bookstores and local libraries.

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Internet Archive's BookReader out in the wild

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Or, not so wild actually, it’s the Library of Congress!

We were thrilled to see our BookReader on the read.gov site today. The Library is using it to showcase of some gorgeous books from their Rare Book Collection, like “A Wonder-Book for Girls & Boys,” “The Baby’s Own Aesop,” and “A Christmas Carol.”

You might also be interested to follow along with a “book in progress” called The Exquisite Corpse Adventure, “an episodic progressive story game” with more than 20 contributors.

There’s information about the BookReader software on the Open Library site if you’re code-y too. We love it when the BookReader gets used!

OLPC Bookreader Demonstration

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Open Library recently launched a web demonstration designed to illustrate how Internet Archive book collections can be viewed on the OLPC XO Laptop.

We invite you to take a look!

It is still in the early stages, and is built on open source software using an embeddable AJAX reader and a software component known as Carousel which scrolls through the collection of books on the right.

We would like to have feedback on how to improve the user experience of this demonstration and its underlying components for users of the OLPC XO and Open Library.

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