Tom, thanks for starting a new thread. I've written a short overview about the state of the "booksphere" (webpages/services related to books). Feel free to correct it / expand it: http://piratepad.net/5QhLcgbyTt
In my opinion there are several roles that the OL can perform very well: - linking hub / aggregation: point to online resources which are specialized in key areas (scans, reviews, transcriptions, annotations, etc) - bibliographic data server: provide bibliographic data, including provenance: who created that data, when, and under which license (or only provide free data). - book copyright info: who holds the rights and how long for. Search capabilities to find public domain works. Then there are roles which, while possible, seem to be already covered extensively by other webpages and it might be too late to compete with them, namely: - reviews - lists - recommendation engine (based on reviews) And finally there is the unexplored field of creative commons publishing. It might be unrelated to the OL, but I haven't found any website in the free culture community that caters for: - self-publishing: connecting writers, proofreaders/editors, and cover creators that want to collaborate publishing CC works - CC works storage: something like PG or WS, but for newly created works - on-demand printing - donations for the authors (indiegogo and kickstarter take care of crowdfunding only) The solutions that exist right now are: Lulu (for-profit), Amazon CreateSpace (for-profit), unglue.it (crowfunding for releasing copyrighted works as CC) and BooksLLC (sells digital/printed PD works). While not in the original plan, maybe you can also give it some thought to this. Cheers, David
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