Greetings,
Im new to the list here - but am very interested as to what is on the
horizon for microformats. As I have been researching and using
microformats, I can immediately see their benefit - and the need for
more (in different areas). I have also been reading about structured
blogging and the strides being made there.
My question is (as I haven't been able to find an answer yet) - is
there a draft for a 'book' microformat? Not like 'boom' where it has
information about the 'guts' of a book - but a book microformat for
the entity itself. For instance, a book as a title, summary, price,
author(s), publisher, etc. As the developer of www.barbourbooks.com,
I have been looking to see something like this get developed for an
array of reasons:
1. As a publisher, we often need to the ability to send out
information on specific books. Much like the Amazon API lets me pull
book information from their website, there are many others who would
like the same for their site (without having to have an API or
knowledge to build from the API). Authors want syndication, re-
sellers want syndication, etc.
2. We have authors who would be very interested in syndicating their
books to their website - but have no clue how to get the information
with minimal effort or redundancy (IE: Always having to check out
site for updates to books/prices/etc).
3. Users are constantly searching our site for specific books and
information related to the books. The goal of microformats to re-use
existing technologies ((x)HTML, CSS, etc), and to make it both user/
machine friendly makes this a perfect avenue. Just as with hReview or
hCard (adr) - we want to make a decentralized service that helps
people find exactly what they need. If there were a standard for
books like this, searching on an ISBN would be much easier to find
price comparisons and even reviews related to that book.
4. As a developer I have the need to export in different formats, not
to mention the need to syndicate the information across multiple
sites. I would like the 'subscribe' ability of the book listing to be
something that could be used without much time on other developers part.
Overall, I think it would be beneficial and I am still searching for
what is available (if any). I know that hReview will eventually
(hope) move to more specifics with the 'type' attribute to include
'book' - so this would extend well from that. Same is true for author
information, that could be a vcard extended from the root element of
a book - allowing re-use of already existing principles in place.
I hope someone can point me in the right direction.....
Peace,
Nate Klaiber
http://nateklaiber.com
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