Your personal online OPDS-library
 

personalbookspace is a new service that lets you put all your e-books online in a private space and make them available in any OPDS-enabled e-reader. Users can organize their books in folders. Within the e-reader they can browse them to find and download books or perform a full-text search. Cover previews and meta-data are extracted automatically.

http://www.personalbookspace.com/

Werner Donné
Pincette bvba

What is opds?

OPDS is the Open Publishing Distribution System. It is a protocol, defined at http://opds-spec.org/blog/2010/08/29/opds-catalogs-v1/, that allows devices and other client programs to discover and use digital content in remote catalogs. Certain e-readers use it to access public online book catalogs. Some of them let you add additional catalogs, which are always referred to with a URL. The protocol first appeared in the Stanza e-reader for the iPhone (http://www.lexcycle.com/).

ah a new European system....

Or you can just sign up or use your google account, open Google Docs http://docs.google.com and upload your book files from your reader there for free and get the same amount of storage space (1024MB).

Sound like a potentially useful service, but with the plethora of free online storage possibilities already available, there's exactly no chance I'd pay for something like this. Also, 10 Euros will buy me an 8GB SD card....

@screwballl
And you read your books in which e-readers then?

OPDS isn't European, if that can put you at ease.

I'm not sure what you are saying about what advantages this gives me over something like Dropbox or another online storage solution. Most of those come with 1GB/2GB for free and then you can add on with referrals and such.

I store my book files @ Dropbox. I can then access them with my Kindle and my iPADs to read them. I can't with the Sony pocket because it doesn't have WiFi or 3G.

No cost.

@abookreader
OPDS is an open protocol. A number of e-readers support it and provide the user a completely integrated experience. It is as if the catalog they are browsing is part of the e-reader. This is how those e-readers make services such as Feedbooks available. A strong feature of OPDS is that it provides full-text search through an entire library within the e-reader. personalbookspace implements this.

Using Dropbox requires more technical skills. In order to provide the same experience as browsing through folders you create yourself, you need a tool like Calibre2OPDS, which will generate a website for you that you have to upload to Dropbox. This is not an option for many people. It is also tedious to maintain when changes occur in your library.

With personalbookspace you just create folders and copy books into them. You can move around your books, change your folders, etc. All changes are visible in the e-reader immediately.

ah, it does sound like it would be useful if a user had a large reference library which they would need to consult or search frequently.

Moved to the self-promotions forum.