John, you asked a lot of interesting questions. I also think we should discuss them and the mailing list is a good platform for that.
Here is my wishful thinking about OL. You may disagress, you may even prove, I've understood OL wrong (since I now know a lot of people use OL in ways I couldn't even imagine), but at least I've not kept my mouth shut and colmplained afterwards. I'm frequently doing research on book contents. Am I going to buy it or not? Have I already read it? What the hell is this famous author writing about since everybody knows him, except for me? Right now, I often use Amazon for that since it contains almost every information I need. But Amazon is closed and it sells books. I'd prefer to have an open and neutral site which serves user interest, not client's. OL would be great if it contained more books and more descriptions. And I'm willing to contribute (I'm already) to see that happen. The interface is already quite good for doing so. What I'd like to see is internationalization. I understand english descriptions but some people don't. Currently, I can't add a second description in another language. And I'd be happy if I could tidy up better. A lot of editions are created as works, even if there is already a main work page. I can copy them into the main work but the duplicate entry has to be deleted. I understand it's a lot of work to answer all the requests sent by users on the pages, but getting an answer takes a lot of time from a motivated newbie's point of view. Maybe we could document a way how to get deletion rights. More people would get the work done faster. Second important point: The website should only be one interface to that data. OL and it's data can be the solid base for a lot of projects that do great things with books: selling, recommending, drawing links between them, ... Keeping an open API is encouraging cool spin off apps. That's how I see OL's future. _______________________________________________ Ol-tech mailing list Ol-tech@archive.org http://mail.archive.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ol-tech To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send email to ol-tech-unsubscr...@archive.org
