Book Publishers: Stop Worrying And Love APIs
Crossing the Streams (of Data)
I attended PodCamp Toronto this year and sat in on a presentation by Montreal’s Jerome Paradis on semantic shopping. Jerome is working on a start-up (that is quasi-stealth) in the shopping space.
Paradis presented a vision of the future of shopping where the consumer is in control. Imagine sitting down at your computer to buy something. You open up a generic shopping application that pulls in streams of data from several retailers at once. The data can be filtered in a way that is personal to the user and the application can be customized to show the user info the way they want to see it. Essentially this amounts to an RSS reader for semantically marked-up products.
Three major things need to happen before Paradis’ vision can become a reality — 1) there needs to be a standard for how suppliers tag their products 2) a generic shopping platform would need a generic payment system 3) suppliers and retailers need to recognize the value of and then develop an API.
This last point is one that caught me off guard. In his presentation, Paradis referenced the MacMillan/Amazon fracas. The controversy over how to price books takes on some needed clarity in a universe of competing APIs. Book publishers could simply bypass the middleman while still giving the consumer the benefits of an aggregator. My question is do book publishers have the imagination to see the potential of an API? Would they be too afraid to create one when they don’t know where their data would ultimately go and how it would be used? It is early days yet but it is about time book publishers became promiscuous data sharers.
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