There is no podcast app for books
Every week I rehearse with a singing group. Mixed ages, mixed comfort with technology. At some point in most rehearsals somebody is pinch-zooming a PDF on their phone — a scan of handwritten sheet music — trying to find their line.
What they need isn't a better scan. It's a living document: scores that reflow instead of squint, a recording of each part one tap away, corrections that arrive before next week. EPUB 3 does all of this today, and it's sitting in everyone's pocket behind a bookstore icon.
What's missing is the way to hand it to them.
The stores are not the format
Apple Books, Kindle, Kobo, Play Books do their job: one author, a million strangers, a payment. I'm not asking them to change, and this isn't an escape story. (It's also not about money — I'm interested in non-commercial publishing, the writing most of us actually do, so DRM and paywalls are out of frame.)
The trouble is that when the stores are the only channel anyone knows, the store's limits get mistaken for the format's limits. My songbook — live notation, embedded recordings, twenty readers — has no door into any store. Wrong format support, wrong audience size, wrong update model. So it doesn't occur to people that a digital book like that can exist at all.
Sharing falls back to what's left: a Google Drive folder, a Dropbox link. And PDF.
We ran this experiment already
Audio had the same problem and solved it twenty years ago. Podcasting is a feed you host anywhere, an open file format inside it, apps that poll feeds, and directories that are indexes rather than owners. Nobody asks permission to publish a podcast. Radio survived fine.
The mapping onto books is almost one-to-one:
- RSS feed → OPDS catalog
- MP3 enclosure → EPUB file
- podcast app → reading system with OPDS client
- podcast directory → nothing
Three of the four pieces exist.
OPDS is the piece most people haven't heard of. It's a catalog format — a feed of books — and it's been around since 2010. A static file on any host is a valid catalog; feeds don't need servers that think, so a bucket or a WebDAV folder will do.
Reader apps that speak OPDS exist too — Cantook, Thorium, KOReader. You could subscribe to a book catalog this afternoon. Almost nobody knows that, which is a culture problem rather than a software one.
Libraries are the interesting case. Public libraries mostly outsourced digital lending to OverDrive — a store wedged inside the institution built around the freedom to read. And smaller collections have nothing like the boring service layer podcasting has in its hosting companies: somebody to mind the tech while the catalog and the licensing stay the collection's own. A choir's songbook shelf shouldn't need more sysadmin than a podcast.
The missing piece is a shelf
Podcasting had a directory from year one: open submission, an index that pointed at feeds it didn't host. Books have no registry, no index, and no habit of catalogs pointing at each other.
Fixing that needs no new technology. An OPDS catalog can list other catalogs, so a directory of book feeds is just another book feed. Anyone can publish one with a text editor.
What's missing is the blogroll culture — people keeping shelves: small, curated, partial, plural. Shelves listing shelves. No center to capture, and no center to pressure either. In 2009 a rights dispute led Amazon to remotely delete Nineteen Eighty-Four from readers' Kindles. Nobody wanted to burn a book that day — the lever existed, and got pulled. A network of shelves has no such lever. Librarians have a phrase for this: lots of copies keep stuff safe.
The listening party
I keep a catalog of songbook EPUBs for my group in a cloudflare R2 bucket. The catalog is real and the subscriptions work in Cantook. And most weeks what actually happens is I bring an android tablet and a bluetooth speaker and run a listening party for the room. One curator, one device, everyone else singing.
That's about where podcasting was in 2003 — one person with an aggregator, playing files for friends.
The extra piece
I've spent my time on the authoring end of this. SEED.html exists so that producing a valid, accessible EPUB 3 is trivial — plain text in, book out — and the publish step writes an OPDS catalog to remote storage as a side effect. Hosting was never the problem; a bucket works. The reader apps exist.
A culture that wants to share long-form writing and living reference work, based on web standards, needs one extra piece of infrastructure: the directory podcasting had from year one.
Three pieces built. One to go.
