Microformat Request: Book
I recently finished reading Microformats: Empowering Your Markup for Web 2.0 by John Allsopp (A review and more information to come soon). Without saying too much, this book was incredible from many standpoints. I have been researching and implementing Microformats for a few of my recent projects. I am sold on their value and their purpose — and am excited to see what will be developed as we move forward.
A couple months ago I was talking with friends of mine at Clear Function about Microformats, structured blogging, and how this could be used for an array of developers (Designers, Programmers, HTML Coders, etc). The premise of Microformats is to make things human and machine readable — so there really is a low barrier of entry for someone who is interested. It isn’t a new language — it builds from your existing markup and only helps to generate CSS/JS hooks as well as (obviously) give your information more semantic meaning.
As the developer of the website for Barbour Publishing, Inc., I can see even more uses from a new Microformat: Book.
I have signed up for the Microformats list and plan to be active in what is developing there. I have also been reading through the documentation and wiki related to Microformats. I submitted this suggestion/search for help this morning:
Greetings,
I’m 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:
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. I would like a simply way to have this information sent out — without having to create an API for Barbour Publishing (it isn’t widely adopted enough to really build something like this).
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). Having a simple method for them to retrieve recent information (without the use of XML or other technologies) would be the best option.
Users are constantly searching our site for specific books and information related to the books. The goal of Microformats to re-use existing technologies (XHTML, CSS, etc), and to make it both user and 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.
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/O). I would like the ‘subscribe’ ability of the book listing to be something that could be used without much time on other developers part (or need for resources from a database or other storage mechanism). We have several sister sites that utilize some of the same information — it would be nice to syndicate to these sites versus any model and application logic being needed.
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
typeattribute to includebook(versus the use of the genericproduct) — 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.
Anyone have any thoughts related to this? As I have stated above — I am still searching, so if there is already something like this in the works I would be interested to check out the drafts or specifications.