Project aims
From Open Bookmarks
This page is a draft. It does not represent the final position of Open Bookmarks, and should not be taken as doing so.
Open Bookmarks is a project to create an open standard for sharing reading attention data and bookmarks in electronic books. A longer introduction, with background, can be found at booktwo.org.
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Intentions
Open Bookmarks intends to facilitate the creation of this standard, through this wiki and associated website and blog. The wiki will open for registration in late November 2010.
Once a standard has been defined, Open Bookmarks will work to promote and support its wider adoption.
Results
The intended result of the Open Bookmarks project is that any reader on any electronic reading platform will be able to bookmark and share their reading activity within the platform, save and export that data, and share that data between other platforms and service providers, securely and reliably.
See use cases for some examples of what Open Bookmarks intends to facilitate.
Requirements
Craig Mod's ereader incompetence test is a good place to start, and the following relevant recommendations should be considered preconditions for Open Bookmarks:
- Ereaders should display text, not images of text (.jpeg, .png, etc).
- It should be possible to select and copy text.
After this, the following requirements apply to Open Bookmarks:
- It should be possible to save a location pointer
- It should be possible to select and save text as a highlight.
- It should be possible to annotate existing text with notes supplied by the user.
Open Bookmarks will then facilitate the following requirements:
- A reader can save or export their bookmarks and attention data out of the reading platform.
- That data will be in the form of a published open standard.
- A reader can sync the data from their platform with other reading platforms, or with third party services.
For more examples see the use cases.
Out of scope
It's also worth noting what is not in the scope of Open Bookmarks:
- Security and privacy: readers and the services they use are responsible for the availability and use of their own data.
- Authentication and identity: Open Bookmarks is a transmission protocol, separate from authority.
